#oc: velnira coris

[sith-shenanigans]

Thinking about Sirue and Velnira’s dynamic and being super normal about it (I am not being super normal about it). A Jedi’s unconditional compassion for someone who is so scared and so angry and so clearly a victim of circumstance forging a friendship that Sirue can only see as indulging some tiny futile hope that her partner—the partner she lost—had some kind of family somewhere, and she’s almost right, because Ahene and Velnira are related, it’s not a coincidence they have the same last name, but that’s such a vanishingly small chance. And she never talks about it. Because it would be awful to talk about it—not only are you (on the wrong side of the law) running into this shining example of Jedi perfection (should probably be arresting you), you got to know her because she reminded you of your dead partner in some tiny way at a point when you were completely broken into little bits by grief. That’s an awful thing to tell someone. That’s—it might not ruin the friendship, but it feels so terrible and kriffed up and pathetic that Sirue doesn’t even want to think about it, except she also definitely thinks about it way too much. Velnira would forgive her! Of course Velnira would forgive her! But from her point of view… well, Velnira is entirely too forgiving.

But also, if Sirue had talked about it, Velnira would have realized who that Sith apprentice she met on Tatooine was.

[sith-shenanigans]

3 and 19 for your choice of character for the SWTOR Character Ask meme!

Okay, I’m going to answer this for Velnira, because neither answer is really in the spirit of the question, but I think they’re both interesting because of that.

3. What Forbidden Romance — i.e., one not permitted by the game — would or do they embark on? (If they're a romance sort of person, of course.)

So, Velnira is (almost certainly) acearo. She doesn’t do romance, she does diplomacy. She was supposed to maybe end up queerplatonic with Nadia.

Then I started writing her, and she somehow ended up. Having a childhood-friend qpp. With the “talk to your trainer” npc.

And this is how Hallen ended up on the Jedi Consular crew.

19. If they could have killed anyone the game didn't give them a chance to, who would it have been?

Strictly speaking, no one. She has never made a dark side decision in her life. But there is someone she wanted to, and that’s Warden Playt.

She got to Belsavis knowing nothing except that it was a prison world (which was bad enough), and that it was rioting. Then she landed, and talked to Playt, and immediately learned about the Condemned—the second-generation prisoners that grew up on Belsavis, never knowing freedom.

She’s a Jedi, and she’s a good person, and she has a great deal of self-control, and so she did not actually nearly snap his neck. But she was suddenly very, very aware that she could, because it clicked into place all at once that the Republic was condoning this, and that there was a very real chance that she would not be able to stop it and still go home after.

(She did not consider for a moment that there was a very real chance that she would not be able to stop it.)

If Velnira ever fell, it would look like a quiet crying breakdown where she tried to process what she knew she was about to do, followed by her picking herself up and dusting herself off and very calmly making a lot of choices she never believed she would make. And the crying breakdown is optional, under enough stress for time.

So in my ideal version of the Belsavis planet quest where everything went completely irretrievably off the rails, [Kill Playt] would have been one of the options on the dialogue wheel, and she just didn’t take it.

[swtor character ask meme]

[sith-shenanigans]

SWTOR ask meme, 5 + 27 for Velnira? If you haven't done those numbers already ofc.

5. Do they have nicknames from other characters, & if so, what are they?

A lot of people call her “Vel.” Sirue probably has a nickname for her, but I don’t know what it is. I feel like Hallen has several very silly nicknames somewhere, but… I don’t really know what they are, either.

27. They need to choose two of their companions to work together on a mission. Who, & with what reasoning?

Qyzen and Zenith, for a wilderness-stealth mission, because their skills go together well. Hallen and Ru, the forbidden companions, because Ru is very good at slicing things (combat) while Hallen slices things (technological). Hallen and Tharan would probably work together well since they’re both the techies of the ship, but last time Hallen decided he was somewhat insufferable and threatened to hit him with a hydrospanner, so it’s a bit of a mixed bag there.

[swtor character ask meme]

[sith-shenanigans]

If your Jedi ocs had to disguise themselves as a Sith, how convincing of a job would they do?

👁 thank you for this question, anon!

Brakerre (Liminality/Discontent): Not convincing. It’s not that she can’t be scary, it’s that she can’t summon up any kind of reasonable “what would I be like as a Sith?” persona. The things she cares about enough to fall if she had to… aren’t Sith things. Her Bad End is “living weapon,” not Sith Lord. (Result: she waves her lightsaber around a lot and starts a fight, probably. Though she manages to fake still being brainwashed for a bit on the Emperor’s station.)

Velnira (Liminality/Discontent): Canonically does scarily well. She takes out the pigtails and she puts on Sithy clothing and does this thing with her voice and now Tharan is a little bit terrified, thanks. The good bean has a lot of… force of personality that usually doesn’t come out, and is also surprisingly good at lying to people. After all, she’s trained for diplomacy—understanding other people and figuring out how to present yourself to them is part of that! Controlling your reactions and not giving the wrong things away is part of that! Manipulation skills are part of that! This is why diplomats are also frequently involved in espionage! It’s the fact that she has a capacity for dishonesty that kind of blindsides people, and the fact that “pretending to be a Sith specifically, when she is Made of Shiny” is within her ability. (That said, she can’t shield her aura worth druk, so if a real Sith shows up… she’s basically out of luck. This is why she isn’t a Shadow-in-official-cover-as-a-diplomat.)

Hallen (stolen minor npc): Panicking inside, but does better than you’d think. Unfortunately, Iridonian zabraks aren’t common on the other side. She could pass for a very short period, but then people would get suspicious.

Ru (Liminality/Discontent): Whoops, we’re fighting now. Boring conversation anyway.

Nayan (Sunlight, but maybe not exclusively): She was trained as a Jedi Shadow. She never managed this kind of mission, having left the Order before her knighting, but she would have been judged psychologically qualified. (Before the metric ton of trauma, anyway.) She could do it for an extended period of time—and, in like a moth to you, sunlight, she does. Of course, she eventually gets caught…

[sith-shenanigans]

chaos, yet harmony

(Velnira, my good bean consular, by the excellent e.therius/outheros)

[sith-shenanigans]

I don’t know if you’re the same anon as before, but thank you for the ask either way, I would lay down my life for you. Liminality spoilers (and an answer) below the cut, with the disclaimer that everything not up on AO3 is subject to change:

Ahene is not paid enough for this. (One could argue, after a certain point, that this is her own damn fault, seeing that she’s in charge of the government agency that’s paying her. She is of the opinion that it is not possible to be paid enough for this. Of course, that describes the vast majority of things that happen to her.)

Ahene and Velnira get along pretty well, possibly unsurprisingly. Neither of them generally wants to pick a fight they don’t have to, though Ahene’s definition of “have to” is much more flexible than Velnira’s. Neither of them is the sort of person who would pass up the option for under-the-table diplomacy, either, though situations where it’s worth the risk are rare. On Odessen, once they’re finally on the same side, they actually bond as siblings—though some of that was the result of introducing Yuon. (Yuon was astonishingly willing to accept that her former padawan knows some rather terrible people, given the opportunity to compare historical research with said terrible people. Then again, Yuon possibly knew already…) There were discussions. Velnira did much more listening than talking, but she liked it that way.

And for when they don’t get along… well, someone needs to be the Alliance’s moral compass, and Velnira’s moral compass has never bent for anyone. She won’t go against the command team’s decision unless she’s very sure, but it’s happened.

Ahene and Orinara… also get along fairly well, but there is a bit of an initial, uh, disconnect. Orinara is getting back the twin she thought was dead, and believes that Sith society is just as much Ahene’s birthright as her own—even if her sister didn’t know it. But it’s not a “birthright” that Ahene wants. She doesn’t want to think about herself as some lost bastard Sith noble; discovering Orinara threatens her conception of herself. There is no Ahene Izarae, and Ahene wishes her life had been different in a hell of a lot of ways, but she doesn’t wish she’d had that life instead. And… I think it’s a while before they fully come to terms with each other, because of that.

They’re both pretty much 100% ride-or-die people when they get attached to someone, though, so once they do start getting along—they argue a lot, but they also have an extremely deep and intense trust in each other. (And they’re Sith. Arguing is part of how they show love.)

Velnira and Orinara have, uh. A fascinating sibling relationship. They are the galaxy’s perfect good-cop-bad-cop routine. This is because they are both completely sincere about it.

They actually have a weird amount of respect for each other, though, especially after working together during the five-year gap. And Orinara isn’t an unthinking brute; she knows she’s playing the bad cop, and that Velnira—who is an idealist, not an innocent—is playing off her. She’s… willing to use that, even if it means giving up some fights. And Velnira would rather have Orinara near her, being tempered by her, than have Orinara somewhere else doing who-knows-what.

……then there’s Alsair, of course, who is sort of an honorary sister. She gets along with Ahene extremely well. No one can figure out why.

[sith-shenanigans]

For the meme: 6, 19, 20

6. What character do you have the most fun writing?

Astonishingly, it’s… not actually Ahene! This isn’t her fault—she’s a main protagonist, so there is a certain degree of “beating the plot grimly into shape” inherent in the system.

I think the character who I’ve had the most fun writing, most consistently, is Alsair. She’s just a complete mess of a person, but in a fun (faux-)cheerful way, and she gets a bit of a character arc and then goes offscreen and has some wonderful development that I’ll mostly only have to hint at once she shows back up.

I am also extremely fond of writing Zaril’aaln. And the Broken Chain in general, but he’s the one who just showed up in my head despite not actually being in that scene in my original conception of it, and then he started talking and. Well. I love him a lot. Him and his plot-relevant backstory he very much wasn’t supposed to have. :’D

Of the protagonists, Ahene is on another level from the rest, but in a way that’s… kind of orthogonal from “favorite to write,” honestly? She’s the one with the deepest emotional meaning to me because she’s where I went when my depression was worst and everything seemed to be falling apart and trying to have the normal kind of hope just made me sick with panic. (I believe her “birthday” was February 23, 2016, so one can kind of guess at what was going on in the world at the same time I was hitting my own personal mental low point.) So I ended up with a character who doesn’t have hope, doesn’t have faith in the world, but still says yes, this matters, the things you do matter. She’s not a good person, her arc is kind of a corruption arc (at least in the first fic), but it is very much also an arc about… power being a function of how many things you’re willing to be responsible for, and being the sort of person who will build hope out of the sheer grim conviction that somebody should be doing it and she’s the one they’ve got.

(This was not the arc I thought I’d get when I started playing. I thought she would be a ds!inquisitor when I started playing. I also thought she would be a sorcerer, though, back when you picked at level 10, and she has been very clear on who she is and what her plot should be despite all my early efforts to make it something else.)

But is that always “most fun to write”? Erm. Well. Not entirely. I know her story best, which helps, but writing it is not always fun so much as cathartic.

The most fun main protagonist might be Orinara, who thinks trauma is something you inflict with a heavy object and who I have been setting up to smack righteously with the Clue-by-Four of Character Development. It might be Velnira, because Void alive, “unrelentingly good person who has been raised slightly ivory-tower but has a mind shaped just a bit like a corkscrew despite this” is such a fun character concept. I cannot say if it is either of them, because getting plots rolling is terribly un-fun for me and so their plots slightly languish.

(Sirue is so much trauma and anger and I love her dearly but she is not consistently “fun” for the same reasons Ahene is not consistently “fun,” minus the Empire being terrible and horrible right around her, but plus the criminal underworld existing enthusiastically and sometimes homicidally in her general vicinity.)

19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)

I, uh, think there have been occasional rashes of head-tipping. Ahene has a distinct fondness for using things like “probably” and “really” as sarcastic intensifiers, which leads to me having to excise extras from paragraphs. I also sometimes worry that I’m belaboring her un-expressiveness too much, but that one is at least for a good reason; people will fill in “standard” body language on their own if I don’t. But, well. There are definitely a lot of places where her narration explicitly notes not doing something. She is very prone to explicitly not doing things.

Characterization and trope-wise… “hard” femininity and “soft” masculinity, which isn’t quite the same thing as masc female characters and fem male characters (though those also frequently show up). Characters who change the world just by existing in it as who they are. Responsibility as a kind of charisma; responsibility as a kind of power. Determination, likewise. “Everything you do matters, even and especially when it doesn’t.” Lack of closure as closure. People Being People no matter how famous or powerful they are; the very most terrifying characters being either the most Just People at their core or the ones who have done the impossible and become Something Else. The importance of caring about people even when they aren’t inherently good. Self-awareness as a major character trait (okay, this one is partly because I can’t imagine not analyzing myself all the time). Society as character. Society as eldritch horror. Interconnection and counterbalance as the opposite of and corollary to “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Semi-relatedly, a degree of “power is often another word for agency, and both having it and lacking it can corrupt, especially if it’s both at once, because desperate and traumatized people aren’t their best selves either.” Semi-relatedly again, “power is violence, unless society is deliberately set up to buffer it, and even very carefully applied violence has collateral damage and unforeseen consequences.”

… it’s really all about how people interact with each other, huh.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

I have answered this once already here, and am delighted to do it again!

I’ve talked about symbolism a bit, so now here is a secret theme: Ahene and Sirue’s arc is kind of about their romantic relationship, it is at the heart of who they are as people, but it’s also… not. It’s about not being the highest-priority thing in each other’s world anymore. Because they were each other’s whole life for a while, they were two halves of a whole, everything they did was for each other, and that is horribly codependent, actually. It is somewhat bad. It is not a relationship based on healthy emotions, there is a foundation of love but there is also a foundation of literally so much trauma. So. They need to sort that out.

Now, it will take them a long time to get there, but… it’s planned.

[meta asks]

[sith-shenanigans]

meta asks-

20- Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

21- What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

Oh stars, there is so much of this, though. I am a very meta-heavy writer. Which is a lot of why I can (excepting snippets) generally only write linearly.

… The number one bit of “simple” symbolism is that fire is Important in Ahene and Sirue’s arcs. Not physical fire, necessarily, because I’m really not a fan of physical symbolism; unless supernatural forces are currently acting on the world in a big way, the world contorting itself to fit metaphor breaks my suspension of disbelief. But metaphorical fire is a large thing. Fire is anger, yes, but more than that, fire is sacrifice. Fire is the part of you that grabs the lit end of the saber, that raises the stakes, that accepts that the victory and the cost are not separate things. And being willing to burn for something is always a kind of defiance.

Velnira and Orinara, meanwhile, get a related-but-different metaphor. Theirs is the concept of the sun, which is glory and unrelenting gravity and sheer intense force of personality. It’s… maybe not wholly a dark symbolism, but it usually is. Suns are meant to be suns; people are generally not. Orinara is consistently described as a sun by others—she’s not a diplomatic character, but she still has a great deal of charisma, and her personality exerts a kind of gravity on the people around her. Velnira is trying to avoid it, despite having the will and the charisma and the persuasiveness to be the center of other people’s worlds. A sun casts light, but it does not serve the Light.

(Yes, suns are also necessary for life. Suns are meant to be suns. The metaphor is about people, as compared to something enormous and inhuman and influential-just-by-existing.)

21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

Honestly, I feel like Liminality would lose something as anything but prose? Seeing an animated-series adaptation would be visually stunning, and it would capture nuances of expression and body language that I can only sketch out with prose, but there is a whole lot of interiority involved. Especially with Ahene, where the disconnect between her outward/inward personas is so important. A comic could get some of that, but not as well, and animation would… struggle.

If I really think about it, I think even a different kind of prose medium would have issues? The story relies on being web fiction, which isn’t paced like a set of novels—web fiction can be to novels what novels can be to novellas, and while the book-length arcs do ramp up and hit closure points, they wouldn’t be… entirely satisfying as books. And the story is very long. Book series are only very rarely that long, unless you’re trying to write the next Wheel of Time. But the most famous web fiction tends to be that long; look at, say, Worm or A Practical Guide to Evil. Which is why I say “web fiction” and not “fanfiction”—there are fanfic novels and novellas and short stories! But that is not what I am writing.

Webcomics are probably closest? I feel like a webcomic could follow the same story effectively, since they’re frequently paced more like web fiction than anything else is, and could use the medium well. An animated tv series could use the characters fairly well, but would probably end up straddling the midpoint between what I’m writing and the original game. Anything else would end up in “this version of the cast and plot is inspired by the original, but they’re very clearly different people” territory, I think.

… on the other hand, my KotOR fic might work better as an animated series in the Clone Wars/Rebels vein. The character arcs are important, but their theme is much more “you are the things you do” and much less “the person you are inside and the person acting on the world are different people, and neither one is more or less you than the other.” The characters’ personalities track their exterior actions, the characters’ actions define their beliefs about the world. No one is desperately clinging to the belief that their actions are wrong, or presenting an outward self that wildly differs from the person inside—or, in the non-Ahene cases, just having character arcs that are far more about how they think about the world (and themselves) than how they interact with it.

Revan falls because of what she’s willing to do; Revan falls because you are your actions is her deepest guiding principle. No one’s arc is really refuting that principle, because it’s the moral theme the fic is working off of! The fic is about Revan’s fall and, uh, reformation (not, she would like to make it clear, redemption). It’s about choosing to do things differently this time. It’s not about how you feel about it, except in being about… it not being about how you feel about it, if you get what I mean. You can choose to do the right thing and not repeat your mistakes and still not know if you can touch the Light anymore, and it doesn’t matter, it is not the thing that matters, the thing that matters is that you are choosing to trust someone else more than you trust yourself and you have never done that before.

…um. Ahem. *clears throat* That was perhaps the meta question again, wasn’t it. Anyway, moving on. I think all of that works very well in a visual medium because it’s about things that are seen and done.

[meta asks]

[sith-shenanigans]

Thank you for the ask, random anon!

I now have (one or two) people who are reading the fic who didn’t know all this already, so Liminality spoilers are under the cut. Which is why this isn’t replying to the ask directly.

CW: mention of forced pregnancy.

Someone kidnapped their mother. Specifically, a Sith kidnapped their mother—whose relationship to Velnira was in Intelligence records that were passed on for military purposes—in order to get at the Barsen’thor and sabotage the Republic’s effort to reconcile with the Rift Alliance. Jareah managed to secretly get a message to Zahoin, who passed it to Orinara.

(Ahene and Orinara had already met. Zahoin found out his other daughter was alive at the same time he found out his other daughter had enormously ticked off Darth Thanaton. He knew he couldn’t afford to get involved, but he told Orinara—or maybe Orinara found out first and told him, I haven’t decided…)

Velnira, who was in fact going to walk into a trap (carefully, trying to have a plan, but still walking into a trap) for about the reasons expected—she didn’t want some random person to suffer just because they were biologically related to her—got her attempted rescue crashed by another attempted rescue, and everyone had rather a bit of confusion to sort out before they briefly teamed up.

There’s more going on than that, but that’s the short form. (And I am likely to evolve it as I get further in, ofc.)

The important side note to all of this is that Jareah was an internal agent when she met Zahoin, and her boss basically tried to sacrifice her—and humiliate her, and violate her—or at least sacrifice her undercover work, as revenge for getting involved with a Sith who managed to, well, screw things up for said boss by existing. And by getting an operative pregnant. She was in her own “official” identity as a secretary, pretending to be fleeing from Zahoin, when she got involved with Velnira’s father (a Jedi!). She was ordered to seduce the Jedi and blackmail him by getting pregnant again, he ended up confessing everything to the Jedi Council after the baby was born, the whole thing was a mess that nobody enjoyed.

[sith-shenanigans]

Dear Velnira, please stop manifesting extra companions. Sincerely, your author.

[sith-shenanigans]

…actually writing Velnira seems to have revealed the character trait of “a little bit sad, all the time” and I’m not sure why it exists but it hurts me

[sith-shenanigans]

2. your switched!toon is just beginning their class quests. how is their relationship with important figures (ex. tremel, harkun, satele, orgus)? the choices that the toon they switched with, have they changed drastically? for Velnira? (I would give SERIOUS money to see Velnira as a Sith, but she would also make a very funny Smuggler)

Everyone wants to see Sith!Velnira and you know what? That’s extremely valid of you.

(faction swap asks)

2. your switched!toon is just beginning their class quests. how is their relationship with important figures (ex. tremel, harkun, satele, orgus)? the choices that the toon they switched with, have they changed drastically?

Jareah didn’t take her third daughter back to the Imperial center—what point would there be to it? She’s still no mother, and her sometimes-partner is nowhere to be found (which might be her fault, at that), and the crèche-schools are no place for a child with power. (Power that had tipped off the girl’s father before she was born. Power that made the planet-mobile on her crib sway when she cried. No crèche-school would miss that for long, and unattended Sith children go to Korriban.) But the Jedi had been on their way. Jareah found a world no one should have cared about, and she left a child there, and we know how that story ends.

Here is what Velnira did, on a slightly different Verios run by a slightly different governor, that got her found: she led a rebellion, or at least an escape. Where Ahene would have found one person she could protect, one person who protected her in turn, Velnira made friends and turned them into allies. Velnira smiled at the Service personnel and never acted on her resentment, even to turn away from it, even to close herself up with those she cared for. Velnira was small and sweet and clever, and she knew when they joked about taking her home—about keeping her as their own child, about calling that a family—that they would never get the chance.

And the ruin camp closed, and she was assigned elsewhere, and one night she gathered up her friends (her allies, her people), and she brought them to the spaceport, and when she told the shuttle captain to take them to Nar Shaddaa and let them go—she knew he would listen. It was the quiet knowing of something biding its time inside her; it was the release at the moment of readiness.

It was a disturbance in the Force. It brought attention. She felt the danger and chose it over an attempt to flee—she sacrificed herself as surely as Ahene would have. She was caught, though the mind-bent captain wasn’t, and sent to Korriban. We know how that story ends, too.

When Velnira arrives on Korriban, she doesn’t try to win Harkun’s favor. She knows it would only make him angrier. But she makes friends there, too, and sees them all die. She reaches out to Ffon and watches him waver, watches him refuse, watches him twitch on the floor in the end. Then, only when it’s over, she smiles at Harkun. Then she thanks him. It probably won’t help, but it can’t hurt.

She has all her charisma, all her force of will, all her blazing need to make things better. She does not have her brakes. (She doesn’t think she needs them.) Velnira makes allies out of everyone she can, bends the wills of many of the rest, and removes those who force her hand. What she draws on can’t quite be called darkness, but it certainly isn’t light—not even if it looks like a mirror of it, a beacon that shines, a brand that burns. She exerts an aura that calls for trust, for cooperation. “Negotiation is the art of finding a lie you can agree on,” she says, and the particular cast of her voice makes you feel like you’re in on the joke.

Zash thinks that they’re a similar kind of person, and that the older, wiser, more treacherous one will inevitably win. It’s almost a shame, she decides. The result is just about the same as usual. Thanaton thinks Velnira is a threat to the order of things, and he’s not quite wrong.

But all of that comes later.

At the end of the very beginning of things, there is an acolyte-now-turned-apprentice, alone, and the people who could have been her friends have died a thousand times behind her eyes, and this cannot break her any more than she was already. This has always happened, and it always will, unless she stops it. She can’t save everyone she cares about—yet.

But she refuses to believe that she never will.

[sith-shenanigans]

Faction swap ask thing, #2 on that top ask list, on the Velnira :3

OHOHO YES EXCELLENT. FACTION SWAP FOR THE GOOD BEAN.

(faction swap asks)

2. does their fighting style change?

Canon!Velnira technically uses the Niman form, but in practice she uses the environment. She steals blasters from people’s hands, flings furniture around, flat-out yanks up chunks of ground and hurls them at people. She made a decision as a young Jedi that she had no interest in being good with a lightsaber; she would rather put that effort into finding ways to take people out of the fight without killing or maiming them. After Nar Shaddaa, she carries a stunner and a few hypos of a sedative that works on most near-humans. Sometimes people still die, even people she didn’t mean to kill, because no one can gauge the force they’re using perfectly in a fight and hitting people with things is still dangerous to them, but she makes an effort.

Inquisitor!Velnira just ragdolls people.

She never gets very good with a lightsaber because no one bothered to teach her. But she has the same utter grounding in her connection to the Force, the same deep confidence, and no fear that it would make her worse if she grabbed onto it with both hands and smiled when it burned.

If you are in her way, then she will move you from it.

[sith-shenanigans]

I feel like Velnira sometimes uses the Jedi reputation for being weird, somewhat naïve ivory-tower types as a bit of a weapon, and I’m… not sure entirely how to feel about that, but it’s at least a little bit hilarious. People think they can pull one over on the sweet innocent pigtailed diplomat, and then she turns out to be an actual skilled diplomat who knew exactly what you were doing and gave you enough rope to hang yourself.

(She has, on occasion, maybe enjoyed the surprise that results a little more than she should. But it’s not like anyone’s getting hurt, just a bit embarrassed, and she’s not passing up better solutions to do it—so she suspects that as flaws go, that’s a relatively harmless one.)

[sith-shenanigans]

Using the Force was like standing in the center of a sphere of light. It was the silent downbeat between each pulse of her heart, the tiny thread of gravity that pulled the ground up towards her feet instead of the other way around. The knowledge that everything was connected, and every connection went both ways, and the only thing to fear from vertigo was the decision to let yourself drop.

Gravity wasn’t a choice. But not every landing had to be a fall.

[sith-shenanigans]

Ahene, Orinara, and Velnira for #5 >:)

[unusual FMKs]

5. kill, betray, have on your zombie apocalypse team

…okay, so, if I betray Ahene or Orinara, they’re going to murder me. So I have to betray the good bean and hope she forgives me.

Orinara would seem on the surface like a good person to be with in a zombie apocalypse, but I don’t think she actually is. She’s an incredible fighter, but would you trust her to scavenge for food or water? Food or water someone who isn’t a poison-resisting space wizard could drink? I do not think she has the necessary survival skills to keep anyone but herself alive, and I don’t have the necessary survival skills to keep me alive, so kill. Sorry, Orinara.

Ahene has actual survival skills, and she’s good at getting around quietly, and she’s probably responsible enough to keep me alive until we find a group large enough that I can actually be useful. (My apocalypse skills are “good at communication, and pretty good at organizing people who are not me.” Which are very important apocalypse skills but they are not the short-term survival ones.) So I will stick with her in the zombie apocalypse.

… Unless this is all one overarching narrative, in which case the only combination that doesn’t definitely end with me dead is betraying Ahene (😭) and hoping that Velnira can protect me. (In this circumstance I am assuming Orinara got bitten by a zombie and was near-comatose, because there is no other circumstance in which I, acting as myself rather than the author, could have a single chance in hell of killing her.)