Carving out a Legacy

[Laira Darkhold]

"Aye, I did catch her, or more she caught me. But I'm keeping her for as long as she lets me hold on." Draco said with a smirk. The formerly old warrior knew about how those things were. Draco hadn't always been chaste in his life, but on the few times he tried to settle down, he really tried, gave everything he had at the time, emotionally and physically, to the relationship.

"No, he doesn't have a Temple. But, he was a student of the Unifying Force. And visions are a cornerstone of that belief in the Force. Knowing someone like him who 'became obsessed with enlarging his view and knowledge of the Force', his mother's words, he has a lot of information on how to interpret and train or practice Force Visions." Draco flipped through the book a handful of pages. If this were a datapad he could search key terms in each chapter and try to quickly skim through Leia's accounts of her life.

He skimmed to the year of Jacen's death, when Leia was turning sixty, out of her prime when her second son died. It was a fairly long chapter, recounting the second half of the Second Galactic Civil War, one of the bloodier conflicts that occurred in her life. Possibly one of the most traumatic experiences of the woman's life, having to bury her son. Knowing this, he moved through the chapter to read the back end, leading up to Jacen's death and the aftermath of the Sith Lord's fall.

An hour or so past, and Draco managed about sixty, seventy pages from the tome-like book. Why the elderly woman had decided to log her thoughts, Draco wasn't entirely sure at the moment, though things were becoming clearer and clearer as information about Solo's lineage presented itself. It referred to his child as 'you' clearly labeling this as something for his offspring. Draco wasn't sure where on the Organa line Faith was, but he hoped it was Jaina's side. He knew the family likely took the Organa name back once they returned to ruling Alderaan, but Draco had never asked. He read stories about the Solo-Organa clan, but never delved that deep into her family history.

Draco sighed and rubbed his eyes, looking at the book. The handwriting was neat, but still harder to read than text would have been. He understood the desire to leave your descendants something of your own, but it did make his life just a little bit more difficult. "Well, there is a passage that she buried all of his belongings that she thought were sentimental on the world of his death. Other than that there isn't anything about exact location, which makes it very difficult, since he died on a ship. I don't know what in the nine hells she was smoking when she wrote this, but its cryptic and of no help at all right now. What do you think." Draco closed the book, a bookmark where he had been reading and passed it over to Ijaat to let fresh eyes turn on it so he could take a few moments, study from the Varanin Holocron, and maybe delve into the two or three subjects that interested him in it.

[member="Ijaat Mereel"]

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Taking the book as he digested Draco's words, the now younger of the pair flipped to the very end of it with a casual air. There was't disinterest in the gesture, nor a discarding of the value and content of the tome. Indeed, it seemed a focused and intense gesture, an indicator that he had some sort of greater purpose rather than being bored. Unlike Draco, though he did so in the private time he had, Ijaat was a prolific reader of quite a few subjects. From common sense and logical ones on smithing or guns, to odd flights of fancy like Po-Kan, Keldorian Justice, a bona-fide comic book that would like be the source of many jokes if found out. So he had developed some habits and as he stopped in the back pages, he merely nodded to Draco and spoke aloud, whether to the other or himself wasn't clear.

"To begin, start at the end... Now see, this is at the time of his death and after his fall... But she describes it almost like I would a nurse watching a long standing terminally ill patient finally die... Resignation, acceptance, understanding... There is little to none of the raw grief and wailing or gnashing of teeth one would expect. Which leads me to believe.... She already felt what was tying her to her son had died...So the answer is..."

Again he took to the book, reading more methodically now when he stopped, though his placing to do so was extremely erratic and unpredictable. From the beginning pages to the very last to somewhere in the middle and back again. At times his lips would move silently, a finger tracing a path, or he would tap the page and his eyes would glaze a moment, obviously marking a place in his mind with his cybernetics. Eventually an hour or two had passed in this fashion. He copying into his mind, and at times taking a break and writing on the flimsi a few notes, then back to reading. The sheets piled up grew, some crumpled and tossed to the ground as the obsessive intellect of the smith emerged for the first time in front of Draco. Not as an aftermath his friend picked him up from, no. But a wild-eyed, dark circled, burning gaze of singular focus.

Finally he wrote something in bold block letters, and cleared his throat, passing it over towards Draco.

"Seems like the answer was in front of us... Just hidden in a mothers grief. Or lack thereof."

[member="Draco Vereen"]

 

[Laira Darkhold]

Draco searched through the Holocron of Ashin Varanin, most of the data within the object didn't interest him in the slightest. The things that did he listened to, he took notes on. He knew there would be other opportunities for him to research those subjects, but he wanted to clear his mind, let Ijaat get fresh eyes on that book and get his mind off the Artifact for a while. They were working fine so far, and his notes about the alternate form of Sith Alchemy intrigued him. Draco was trying to pull away from Sith Alchemy now that he was a family man, preparing to raise two children of his own. This wasn't as far towards the Light as he would have liked, but it was a step in the right direction.

Art of the Small was interesting, but only the crafting and internal augmentations and applications. External applications were incredibly difficult and not as easily manipulated as some people thought. Trying to mess up someone's body during a fight one molecule at a time while they were moving and attacked wasn't something that could be so easily done, if at all. However altering a piece of metal, or aiding your own immune system in repelling antigens and toxins could be very useful. Given that his focus was very much inwards these days, he liked the concepts of Art of the Small. Using it to keep himself healthy, to check on his children while they developed in Faith's womb, to manipulate metals on the subatomic level during forging. Never knew when non-magnetic beskar would come in handy.

He looked up every now and then to observe the smith as he took notes. The smith was much more prolific in the amount of notes he took and the detail he jotted down on flimsi. There was a point to handwriting, it assisted with memory, with learning, and with Force assisted memories, a skilled user could learn much faster than they might otherwise be able to. Draco himself had never really excelled in school, most subjects like math and science didn't interest him like these subjects did. But it was biting him in the butt a little bit, having never really tried to learn how to take extensive, well thought out notes.

When the smith finished and passed him a sheet of flimsi with bold letters written on it, Draco nodded. They knew the word well, encountered it several times in their lives. "Well, its a start. Be hard to find though, but if he has any thing he can use, it makes since for it to be there." Draco crumpled the paper and burnt it in his hands. They were in for a hunt.