But I Never Thought I'd Be Alone to Try

[Kaia Starchaser]

Lots of work to be done. Kaia knew that. But she also knew she had a lot of things to work on for herself. She was a Jedi, but what kind of Jedi didn’t really branch out into the Force? Well, we’ll tell you, a Starchaser. Starchasers as a family, Coren, Jared, Dax, [member="Kinsey Starchaser"], they were all notoriously terrible with the Force, initially. When they first meet it, very little goes right. And then they keep studying, and even less goes their way. They’ll pick up a smattering of Force powers here and there, but it wasn’t until they were on their own, until they met the galaxy on their own two feet, facing it without someone looking over their shoulder, that they actually started to learn the Force, and learn where they fit.

Sure, even going into the exotics – deus ex machina to blame, or whatever, but very few worked well with a Sith or Jedi base – was difficult. The Force was an ocean with so many currents, and for a space-philic family, they used a terrible amount of nautical examples to get their point across. Go back far enough into their past, before space travel was even created, and you could find a very early ancestor of, well, most Corellians, if you went back that far, but definitely the Starchaser clan, launching sea going vessels powered by the waves and wind.

Chasers of the Horizon, wherever it may lay, that may just be the family motto.

But it all came around to the same point. The Starchaser family was one of those that worked better in areas where the Force was unique, and where it called to them. If you look at Coren Starchaser, he was a Warden of the Sky, protector of those in the space lanes, and while he was crap at it, always running around fighting the One Sith and trying to teabag [member="Sage Bane"], he still found a bit of hope for his lackluster Force skills among the Aing-Tii. Token Waters, a half-blood Starchaser, was a Dathomiri witch, and while the blonde was a hybrid of species, she found a skillset revolving around water shaping and vibration creation that worked for her.

It was a niche. Not all Force users needed to be the next Grand Master, or Dark Lord, those with many powers. And the Starchasers were that type of family. They would depend on something a bit exotic to throw their opponent off, and beyond that?

Creativity.

Kaia Starchaser was relying on the latter. With her Odyssey, so essential to a Starchaser’s development, because she could claim herself a Jedi, but that was how Coren, and Kaia, come to think of it, were both Wardens of the Sky, there wasn’t much hope for her to learn all of a Jedi’s skills, or even part of them. She was space-born, of Corellian blood, and very against going planet side.

Her home, the Dawn Treader, and the Wandering Star spent time in orbit, plenty of time. And even more time in hyperspace. And that was where this hopeful dissertation of the Starchasers, the Force and Kaia herself will begin.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

Much like other people, everyone who was Force sensitive had that connection to the world around them. And why shouldn't it change based on the environment that someone had chosen? People in the galaxy don't always become adventurers. Sound someone who spent their Force-awakened life on Tatooine head to a world like Felucia or Coruscant? It would overload them. They may not be able to quantify the sheer life force of these worlds, and they would possibly having an issue with closing them out to find one force among the many. That was how it was for Kaia.

She didn't like to go planet side because of a number of reasons. Bugs. Lizards. Dust. She didn't like it. She preferred starships, hers, yours, anyone's. It made her feel a lot more secure. She understood it was metallic skin separating her from the void, but like the Starchasers of the past, she was an explorer. Intrepid and driven. She needed to be between worlds. It was where she felt alive, where she felt herself. She loved the hum of the engines, the feel of the jumps into hyperspace, even the gravity planets let off.

She could navigate the lanes like anyone, but more importantly, she could discern the different systems. Their gravity wells, the way they rotated, without her equipment. Kaia Starchaser, unlike her father, who was more at home on worlds, some worlds, than she was, while being a kick-ass star pilot, wasn't space born, he hadn't spent the first 15 years of her life exclusively on board a starship. The first time she stepped off, that was a shock. The girl almost passed out, her brother had to carry her home.

Back to space.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

Space was her haven, her love, and the place she fully expected to reach the clearing at the end of the path. With Corellia gone, the Starchasers had no home, with Csilla under the control of the One Sith, even their refuge was taken from them. That meant they were starbound, between here, there and nowhere. She didn’t mind, and her father was one that always blazed trails. She had read the holos, the reports. He was like her, they both had that connection to space, to where they were going, and while he was a bit better at finding objects than she was, she still had that gift, apparently a Starchaser standard, instinctive astrogation.

When she became a Warden of the Sky, alongside her future sister-in-law, and learning from Mara, she found another family like hers. Of course, their name was a lot less superfluous and ostentatious, but another family of ship-bound beings. But now, there was a bit of work to be done for Kaia. She was learning a few new things, or at least breaking ground on something.

The girl had been able to feel gravitational anomalies in the Force. She could sense where the planets were, where asteroids were, black holes… She could feel it. Not just in her body, but in her very being. It was something that she had started doing research on. People were able to jumpstart midichlorians, permanently sever others from the Force and create life.

People were able to open wormholes across the galaxy, fold space and time around them, slip to another plane of existence, but could someone manipulate gravity? Not in the extent that a holoflick would have you to believe. She wasn’t going to even attempt anything that silly, but she could feel fluctuations. Would there be a way to control it? She was hoping so.

The ship was pulling out around the Hoth system, a system that didn’t have much going for it, but did have one thing she wanted. Asteroids.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

The dark haired and tattooed Starchaser had made her way to the training arena aboard her own ship. It was one that had a reinforced glassteel ceiling. She could see the world, the galaxy, the home known as space, outside the confines of her ship. The asteroids, one of which she was orbiting slow. It wasn’t that she was going to be able to move an asteroid, but the swell of gravity, the small pricks in the change of it around her, she could feel that. It was what she was here for. She would head somewhere else to see if she could manipulate it, unless she was able to do it here, against a combat droid.

She sat in the center of the room, well, more… laid? Yeah, she was flat on her back that was what the definition of laying was, after all. She closed herself off, from the world, all electronics were unplugged and the Wandering Star was in a low-energy mode. She took a breath, and let her body relax, leaving the tension, becoming space.

Just understanding, feeling the flows of the bodies around her, the asteroids moving and how they felt, they were bouncing into another, they had small gravitational fields, nothing compared to a planet and even less compared to other massive wells. She could sense out an interdictor through light speed and know when she was getting pulled back into real-space. So now? It was feeling what they each felt like, feeling the current that was the Force and how it bent around gravity. The Starchaser was unaware if anyone had done this, she assumed the Aing-Tii had seen something before, but she wasn’t completely sure.

Maybe this was ground breaking.

Maybe she was just going to lose herself in space.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

They were anomalies, the gravity. It was moving and she could feel it. She could sense it. But could she control it? No. She couldn’t. Not yet. Not here. She didn’t have the strength to move something the size of an asteroid, not even in a no-gravity atmosphere that space was. What she needed was a training ground, a way to base her own changes, her own control off of something else. What she needed was another source of gravity, and something to move.

The sad thing was, that everything aboard the Star had a place, and everything was in its place, and as the writer is writing this, Kaia seems to be developing a sense of the peculiar and doesn’t want to move things to her training room.

Except… there were training droids. Something for her to practice Shii-cho on. Two of them.

That was what she could use. The dark haired Corellian-Csilla-Spaceborn made her way down to the deck where her training droids were. She wasn’t using her lightsaber, she wasn’t in armor. She was in really, just leggings and a tanktop, barefoot, and hair tied in a messy pony tail. Her mind had been on the asteroids, on her ship’s artificial gravity as she made her walk down. She could feel the pull, she knew what she needed to do. It was… like telekinesis, but not quite the same. It was probably going to hurt, but if she could learn something? And teach others?

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

She knew how this worked. The Force and the Starchasers, which was a fethed up relationship. Take any pairing from Game of Thrones, add in that one time you got served a rare steak when you ordered it medium and had to send it back twice, and then you went to the movies next door but the theater caught on fire and it was the middle of January? Yeah, that kind of frakked.

The young Starchaser was going to need to get herself in the flow. Like stretching before any form of activity, going into a battle cold, especially in the way of adrenaline was tough. A Starchaser learned to use this to their advantage though, and the longer a battle went on for, the more… amped they became. It was the trick, because if you could keep your enemy tired, and still move? Then you were winning until the bigger guns came in.

It was how it worked. So, Kaia was starting with a bit of hand-to-hand combat, Warden style, she had her lightsaber, sure, but she didn’t need it. It was going through a style of mixed martial arts, and broken gate, fighting with the droids, the girl was still reaching to the Force, reaching to the asteroids, feeling the anomalies in gravity change, and the way they moved, changed, bounced. How one could affect the path of another. And how her ship’s artificial gravity was assembled, how it worked, and how to counter it without actually touching the electronic components of it.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

When the droids moved at her, the dark haired girl smiled. This was going to be something new. With the warm of being over, the Starchaser stepped back, two and a half steps, it signaled her training droids to take a second to give her a breather. She pulled the Force around her. It was security, it was protection. Something about the Force, it made her feel… whole, complete. It wasn’t that Starchasers couldn’t use the Force, they just needed the right motivation, and there were many things that others could do, that the Starchaser clan would never be able to do.

Unless you were [member="Audrey Starchaser"]. Kaia never really quite got why she was so good. But still, the tattooed Starchaser had more sim time and higher sim scores. But now? Kaia really wished her cousin was here, to help. It would be nice. But the gravity? That was something she was understanding. She knew how gravity wells worked, part of basic education when you lived aboard a starship.

And when you became a Warden? The same thing.

She took a deep breath and signaled the droids to come at her, bro.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

The young warden was reaching to the Force again. She was here to redeem her family line. She knew her father wouldn’t go back to being in the Jedi, never was, never would. He was on his own path, but someone had to lock the Starchaser clan back in with the Jedi. Her grandfather was a Jedi, sure a Service Corps Jedi, but still within the Jedi.

And the New Jedi Order needed specialists, they needed everyone they could gather. And that even meant a Starchaser. Sure, there were the Talith line that was a whole lot better than her own at the Force, but still…

This was for her as much as it was to save the galaxy and stop the Sith. Falling into the flows of the Force, the tattooed Jedi felt the droids coming near. Her family wasn’t the most mechu-deru family, not anywhere near how some people, like [member="Spark Finn"] or [member="Adekos"] were, but they were aboard starships all the time, and the galaxy was a very modern place. It wasn’t a stretch to understand that a droid was moving, within the Force.

As the droid approached, the girl reached out with the Force. It was going to take a while to perfect this, but the droid was slowing. She pushed the Force further and could feel the shifting in the gravity. It was going to be something to worry about, because things were falling off the wall. It was almost as if she was pushing things towards that point, from around it.

Maybe that was the way to make this work, and be useful?

Create focus.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

Focus.

That was something the dark haired pilot could do. She felt the droid approaching but she fell into the Force, she fell into the wellspring, the flood tide that was the Force. And that was the best feeling there was. Invigorating, recharging, refreshing, everything one would expect and hope for. She smiled, a bit more excited and, dare the writer say it, stereotypical, and she flexed.

And that was when the Force being propelled from her took a turn, it swam, and spun, a maelstrom of energy, swirling around a center point, a singularity. Sort of. This was a Starchaser so it wasn’t all that perfect, or strong, but it was downright exciting for her. She all but jumped in place and squealed, and would have, had she not been focusing so much on bending the gravity of that one place. The droid slowed, almost coming to a stop, and before she could get another push on it, the Force seemed to have changed the current, changed the tide, from flow to ebb.

She took a deep breath, falling back into the real, into the here and now, losing the tunnel vision. Still, the room was off kilter, it had been changed. Something happened.

Were the cameras working? Looking at the droid, the space-born Warden tried to throw focus again. Trying to hit the droid in the chest.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

It seemed to work. Dark haired little Kaia grinned. She almost bounced on her feet. The blast from the Force hit the droid in the chest and it started to lift the droid, moving it around a central axis, one not of the droid’s own body. She could see it, the swirling of light, the swirling of the Force. And the droid, and some odds and ends were being thrown around, the longer it happened, the more rotations, the more the grip was being lost and the axis and center point became less and less defined.

That was how it was going to work then? Disrupting the way a person even moved, the way gravity worked around them. What kind of changes could she really do, against the Sith, or against anyone who was coming at her? Hold someone in place, and take a sniper shot at them? That could work.

The wave of exhaustion hit Kaia, and the droid was released from the vortex of energy, the vortex of gravity. She looked at him and gave a subtle shake of her head. A subtle no.

The droid understood. Play time was over.