In the mid-forties, the Second Akala Crisis flat-out broke the galaxy. A dozen worlds got yanked here from another one. The Force was just about unusable. Kwa temples reactivated. Billions of people disappeared, and many never got back. Those of us who did have spent years trying to forget.
There was another impact, I'm sure of it. Something fundamental broke about the galaxy. I've had my hands in the guts of a lot of hyperdrives, done a lot more jumps than most. Hyperdrives have systems that prevent a few kinds of time distortion; when they malfunction, sometimes you get shoved seconds, minutes, centuries, even millennia farther forward than you figured. I think the Second Akala Crisis bent the fabric of the galaxy and those systems aren't calibrated for, weren't designed for, the universe we're in. So any given jump, especially around places heavily affected by the Crisis, might be totally normal or might get temporally wonky.
So time can run differently for some people than for others. For some folks, the Second Akala Crisis was fifty-eight years ago. On paper, sure. On paper. For others I've met it was twenty. An old friend of mine was older than me and is younger now. Childhood friends and siblings wind up years apart, happens all the time and we try to pretend it doesn't. Grandmasters stay young forever; the soldiers they burn through die old. Lovers wind up different ages. Masters and Padawans get reversed. I've tried journaling my subjective life against external timestamps and it's an absolute nek's breakfast. I have no clue how old I am, but I know for fething sure I'm not younger than my wife anymore, and I got off lucky.
If you live your life on a given planet - except for known warped spots like the Tyus Cluster or a chunk of Denon - time's normal. If you go out and do things, go out and see things, you have no idea how your life will line up against the lives of the people you meet or hate or love. And that's not just instinct, that's reality, and it's not going away. Looks like Akala broke us all over again.
There was another impact, I'm sure of it. Something fundamental broke about the galaxy. I've had my hands in the guts of a lot of hyperdrives, done a lot more jumps than most. Hyperdrives have systems that prevent a few kinds of time distortion; when they malfunction, sometimes you get shoved seconds, minutes, centuries, even millennia farther forward than you figured. I think the Second Akala Crisis bent the fabric of the galaxy and those systems aren't calibrated for, weren't designed for, the universe we're in. So any given jump, especially around places heavily affected by the Crisis, might be totally normal or might get temporally wonky.
So time can run differently for some people than for others. For some folks, the Second Akala Crisis was fifty-eight years ago. On paper, sure. On paper. For others I've met it was twenty. An old friend of mine was older than me and is younger now. Childhood friends and siblings wind up years apart, happens all the time and we try to pretend it doesn't. Grandmasters stay young forever; the soldiers they burn through die old. Lovers wind up different ages. Masters and Padawans get reversed. I've tried journaling my subjective life against external timestamps and it's an absolute nek's breakfast. I have no clue how old I am, but I know for fething sure I'm not younger than my wife anymore, and I got off lucky.
If you live your life on a given planet - except for known warped spots like the Tyus Cluster or a chunk of Denon - time's normal. If you go out and do things, go out and see things, you have no idea how your life will line up against the lives of the people you meet or hate or love. And that's not just instinct, that's reality, and it's not going away. Looks like Akala broke us all over again.
