Demons of Future Past

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"I would never, ever have thought that this day would happen. I hope that we can agree to put aside our differences. For years, until we went to Maramere under Project Volkswagen, I shied away from you as a Jedi Healer, but now that I know the one I would usually trust for medical issues can no longer practice because of some Sith Lord"

"Surely you're not talking about Cathul!"

"I'll talk about her case later. There's a reason why I summoned you to Geonosis even though I may as well have summoned you to Glyss"

"Do tell"

"It has something to do with the Techno Empire"

The two Jedi stand side-by-side in Jessica's senatorial office on Geonosis. As a Senator of the Techno Empire, the only one representing a MICS, a Major Imperial Corporate Sponsor, Jessica held several titles: Princess Consort of Glyss (by virtue of her being married to Summer Sovereign), CEO of Ringovinda StarYards, Senator of the Techno Empire, and the last one was held by virtue of Ringovinda StarYards being a Major Imperial Corporate Sponsor (MICS). She was far better known across the galaxy as CEO of Ringovinda StarYards or Senator of the Techno Empire than she was as Princess Consort of Glyss. Hence she insists on not being addressed as Her Royal Highness or Her Majesty outside of Glyss, and, as such, never wears her tiara outside of Glyss. Oh was it hot on a day like this, where the two Jedi meet with one another for the first time in five years, that is, for the first time after she got into some catfight over point-defense as it pertains to the Triage-class.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"The Techno Empire claims it is open to Force-users. I want to make good on this: my promise as a Senator - partially because I am also a Jedi"

"I am a Jedi Healer. Sure I could pilot subcapitals just fine, but there is only one thing I could do for the Techno Empire's Force-users: train them in Force-healing"

Maybe her opinion of the second administrator, whose name she cannot publicly say with respect to the second Force-sensitivity test, will change somewhat. Maybe not. And said Jedi Healer admitted to her one-dimensionality, that which Jessica learned about during that engineering meeting that led to the Triage-class. But before she can be confirmed as an official Imperial Force-trainer, Jessica needs to know her name and, in effect, breaking the confidentiality agreement. Now she realizes that the Jedi Healer has a desire to make up with and to catch up with Jessica, after all these years where they hated each other for an engineering dispute. Better make the most out of it, she thought. I want the Geonosians to have access to a complete range of Force-trainers, and also for future Imperial needs. Imperial Force-trainers will be publicly known, and, for Geonosians, whose ablity to use the Force is extremely limited and unusual at best, one each for any subgroup of powers is sufficient.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"What is your name? I can't promise you a spot in the roster of Imperial Force-trainers without so much as knowing your name"

"All right, Jessica, you win. I'm Catria"

Blue-haired Catria has always admired how Jessica was non-judgmental, rather open-minded, and also how she could be well-reasoned, and a logical woman. She readily admitted that Jessica had rather nice cognitive abilities when they first met, and the same in reverse. That's what Catria liked in Jessica. But Jessica, while not a psychometrician by any means, could somehow think Catria was almost the same intellectually as the first administrator, from whom Jessica returned with more questions than she had answers. Got no more answers from Catria than she did from the first one. But Catria was a little too stuck-up for Jessica, and her stuck-upness made her dislike Jessica. In turn, Catria served aboard the Triage for a few years and she got tired, burned out even, of such large-scale operations of Force-healing, and she preferred to go study more about the Force for a while.

"Catria, I have this new approach to using the Force that you should try. I know you're smart enough for that"

"Let's see how well does that translate to Force-healing"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"You mentioned that I was seemingly smart enough for such an approach to work; what kind of intellectual barrier is there?"

"It's mainly a question of understanding what you want the Force to do and what the Force does on the target"

"Oh"

There were a few more practitioners of such methods. But as Cathul, the most famous practitioner of such methods known today, said once, a Force-user that understands how Force-powers work is a daunting sight. Catria will understand soon enough why. Jessica's hope was that her estimate would prove correct. The very kind of approach that Jessica's master Werah once told that it could backfire and that the Force's lack of logic would make the entire thing collapse. But that's also part of why Summer once said that she knew too much about the Force to be unable to use it. Jessica was to wait for her trainer's signal before she could act on the patient. She was anxious to demonstrate these methods without having to teach her Electric Judgment, Pyro/Cryokinesis or Force-cloak, or even Force-comprehension, which she considers as the epitome of such Force-powers that rely on one's understanding of the action of the Force on its target but Force-healing is also a rather good example.

"Here, my hand hurts"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"That's carpal tunnel for you"

"Jessica, if I may, make your diagnosis first and then visualize the areas of injuries or problems second, and then act upon it"

"More or less how I would myself act"

Understand the symptoms, and then make a diagnosis. Almost as if she was to use allopathic methods for enacting Force-healing. She is no medical doctor but she has some grasp of physiology. But Catria is bewildered just by Jessica making delicate Force-operations on her afflicted hand aimed at unpinching the pinched nerves in her right hand. But that was a rather minor treatment: often the illness people call carpal tunnel is due to pinched nerves. And yet for some reason Catria has started trusting Jessica more than she used to in the past five years, especially since Jessica won out back then when it came to the whole point-defense issue. That, even if Cathul had more medical knowledge than Jessica, Jessica could still amount to something. Especially considering that universities like Dagobah Tech had a tendency of tacking on quite a bit in terms of contributions from BCPM (biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics) when it came to common premedical majors, like psychology. And she briefly considered going to Dagobah Tech back in the day, but turning it down because swamps were not her cup of tea.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"The main problem with us Jedi Healers is that not many have the intellectual firepower to actually understand how the Force works when you use it. I have to acknowledge, you seem to have a lot of knowledge of a lot of different things"

"That's one of the main drawbacks of my approach to the Force: you need as much background knowledge as you can to use it the way I do. Force-push/pull is easy even with that method: understanding what F=ma means is enough"

"Tell me about how you would use the Force in a heart attack"

And that was a big drawback. It's easy for either woman here to forget that not all Force-users will have their intelligence, or will have their abilities to contain huge amounts of information in their brains. Force-comprehension in particular seemed to be less and less effective the smarter its user is, if used on themselves. Even Catria, who was simply bordering on unnaturally smart, was still a genius for a lot of FUs. But Jessica (and Cathul probably would, too) couldn't help but think of what seemed to cause most heart attacks: either a blood clot, an atheroma or an internal hemorrage, but they need to occur in coronary arteries to cause heart attacks. To be fair blood clots as she understood them can be formed by plaques of fatty material, the atheromas, hence why she hears all the time about trans fat and cholesterol when came the time to shop for groceries. But that was the easy part as she understood it, taking little power to do. What takes more power comes after the restoration of blood flow to the heart muscle.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Here treatment is twofold: phase 1, remove the blood clot or repair the internal hemorrage, and phase 2, grow back the dead tissue based on the live heart muscle tissue around the dead area. I've got to say, the second one takes more power and time than the first"

"That's pretty consistent with the general objective of NFU medical practice: knowing you I would think you would apply similar methods to all manner of embolisms, atheromas or internal haemorrages, then again so would I"

"You already ARE using very similar methods to mine, so there is nothing new to you in how I would do it!"

"Deeper knowledge of the Force's action on the target means you can save energy when comes the time to use it, that is nothing new to you either"

Catria always knew that knowledge was power but knowledge as power had its limits. Jessica held that set of beliefs, too. But the woman that once told Jessica to eschew point-defense entirely on a ship with no maneuverability and very slow speed, and that Jessica found a little stuck-up, was actually more similar to her on a practical level. That's the kind of woman with whom differences can be worked out. By stuck-up she meant that someone being used as a Force-computer the way Jessica described it would probably have more traces of dark-sided influences than actually was the case. Baffling, isn't it? At the time she was still dead-set on saying that there was no such power that could amount to what Jessica described. But, while Catria could rant on and on about the failings of many of her fellow Force-healers, she feels she has one more warning about the usage of Force-healing to deliver before she begins the rants.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"There is a reason why I asked you about how you would use the Force in a heart attack"

"I knew that Jedi with Force-healing skills, even basic ones, were expected to come to the aid of people in danger as if a first responder, so I suppose it has something to do with that"

"Precisely: you know about Electric Judgment so tell me what use you could have for EJ in that context"

"I know Cathul once said she used her own Electric Judgment as a defibrillator"

Really? Catria knew about Electric Judgment? In Jessica's mind, Electric Judgment was rather uncommon, so she was lucky in a sense. Whereas the first administrator was about mostly the basic powers (Force-push/pull, Force-sense, mind trick, Force-healing), Catria had a somewhat wider Force-skillset, which meant that, even though she has a nearly identical intellectual makeup to the first one, at least it can't hurt to try explaining in greater depth of what goes into Electric Judgment. Jessica would imagine Catria simply saying that she would send a 200-joule bolt at roughly 1-2 kV, without understanding at a deeper level than that, and she expected Catria to understand E&M at that level. Jessica imagined that using EJ for the purposes of defibrillation was a rather high-voltage but low-power use of EJ, so she imagined that anyone that knows about all three of EJ, Force-healing and CPR even at a basic level, would be able to use the Force as a defibrillator.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"One additional warning: I'm sure that you will heed it because I feel that you know more about how to use the Force than you have power to act based on it, but I've seen so many who don't, especially true of higher-powered Force-users. Do not expect near-instant healing every single time"

"Thank you. I'm sure physiological reasons have something to do with that"

"True, but they are condition-dependent. A generalized cancer in terminal stage or a case of C5H4 virus won't be the same: they both took me over 12 hours of Force-healing apiece to do and I was completely drained afterward - they were close calls in both cases, both happening before the Triage was finished"

Jessica has realized by now that Dr. Turano looks back much more fondly about her time on Ringo Vinda because that duty was much more intimate in its execution, yet gave her some visibility, than serving onboard the Triage. She was well-liked among the Circle of Jedi Healers but Jessica was proving a troublesome case at the time and a rather curious one. Ultimately Catria found nothing neurologically abnormal in Jessica, and neither did the other three: she was a Force-sensitive and her comfort came back upon learning the fact. And unlike the third administrator, Catria knew a little bit more about the methods in use by NFU doctors. Jessica may have been going overboard at the time but better safe than sorry when it came to medical issues that made her comfort diminish by the day almost to the point of rendering her mentally non-functional. But her first instinct was that she couldn't go to a NFU doctor for that sort of thing at the time, because most NFU doctors would refer one to a FU doctor if Force-related symptoms were at play.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"There is nothing neurologically wrong with me, isn't there?"

"No: Force-sensitives' brains are not wired differently from NFUs'"

"I'd like to think that how I use the Force allows me to remain mentally active"

"And I readily see in you someone that prefers to use a brain: then again so am I"

At least Jessica was conscious that the wounds of the past would heal, as it had. They get along a lot better now, that much was clear. Jessica began to understand a lot better that the Force made her act like a madwoman and whatnot, and forced her to reevaluate her entire approach to life: she has always lived out her life without any shred of ability to use the Force up to that point. The first administrator caused her to remove any shred of comfort she might have had at the time, and the other three provided no real relief until the results came, knowing that a Force-sensitivity test turning up positive would change her life forever. Yet there was one thing Jessica claimed on all four occasions: she would never be feeling used by the Force the way she claimed to be if she wasn't smart enough. They readily acknowledged each other to possess rather nice cognitive abilities, so in their respective minds, they knew they could make good use of "knowledge-as-power".

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"One additional thing: although I have the feeling that the way of the Healer may not be for you, pay close attention to triage. I have seen several Jedi who would rather take the gravest cases first, no matter what. But sometimes you don't have time, nor power, to save them all"

"Then I should make attempts at determining who can be saved and who can't. That's an optimization of utility problem"

"I would have expected Cathul to talk about it in such terms, not you"

"It's highly approximate and I know it. You just don't have time, even Force-aided, to process all the information"

In Catria's mind, Cathul was more readily versed in economics than Jessica was, even though they both use it on some level in their respective lines of work. Cathul was familiar with both macro and micro-economics, she needed to in order to be as good a planetary governor as she could be. Jessica was more familiar with labor and managerial economics. But the ethical dilemmas of medicine were unfamiliar to her. She preferred engineering since it was much more amoral (i.e. not concerned with right or wrong) than healing arts were. Poor Jessica: that was a part that the less, and also the more, intellectually gifted among Jedi struggled with most. Hence why some of the more intellectually gifted preferred some branches of consular service, like lorekeeper, researcher, or even seer, to healer. She was much deeper in thought when thinking about triage than she was when thinking about how to use the Force in a heart attack.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Cathul: how did you meet with her? It's as though either she sent patients over to you or you sent patients to her"

"Cathul... I've met her in a psychiatry continuing education course. It was mostly a distance course but before and after each final exam, conducted in person, the university gave a little time for us to mingle. But no, there was no movement of patients either way"

"She is no longer a healthcare professional. Unfortunately she stopped practicing after some Sith Lord beat almost her medical abilities out of her by generous applications of beatings and dark-sided Force-powers. By now I'm your patient, Dr. Turano"

"I've got to say, I've never met a witch doctor that spammed Force-heal the way she did, citing public finances of all things! She is a little unorthodox as a therapist, but Mandos usually put less stock on therapy. A few aruetiise therapist charlatans practiced there until the last Crusade came"

Few witch doctors would actually invoke public finances: this was usually the domain of Jedi and, to a lesser extent, Sith, to invoke public finances as a means to justify the deployment and training of Force-healers. Even so Cathul was one of those who did it best in the past five years: although, by the end of it, she was handed increasingly severe cases, she knew that, while Force-healers were paid the same as generalist NFU doctors, Azure's public healthcare system revolves more and more around Force-healers with each passing day. At the onset Cathul's impact was more easily perceptible than by the end of those five years. Jessica was not surprised though: Cathul has always been one to make the galaxy a better place, accepting to practice on Mandalore of all worlds, where the patients are reputed to be ruthless. But why would Catria so readily talk about all the subtleties and implications of Force-healing in practice one-on-one?

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Ms. Turano, Cathul knows from experience that one professional Force-healer at apprentice level, can save upwards of 250k credits a year, and it accrues exponentially the more skilled the healer, but she found out about the necessity of training additional Force-healers when she realized that the impact of an individual Force-healer on public finances tapered off past a certain point"

"Sounds about right"

"Catria, you're different from most Jedi Healers I've known in my lifetime: they usually would not stop and think about the impact of what they do, much less on a macro-level"

"A contrario, in my mind a Jedi Healer must be able to look at the big picture, or even someone that wants to learn Force-healing. It will make the Force-healers able of doing Force-healing more responsibly"

"That's a lot of responsibility, especially the better-skilled you are at it"

There are a lot of well-intentioned Force-users who only wish to spam Force-healing without any clear plan as to how their actions fit with the patient, the profession or the galaxy as a whole, or even doing unethical acts even if said acts ultimately helped all parties involved. They may be sworn to protect the weak and defenseless from evil and, like Cathul, put the needs of the many over the needs of the few (public finances and health are both part of the needs of the many), but if they have no idea of what they were doing, they were usually not gaining the trust of patients or the communities they served. Catria and Jessica both knew that a Jedi Healer that knew what they were doing was worth a lot more to a community than one who didn't. Ideally a Jedi Healer would have to both possess appropriate knowledge of biomedical sciences (although not necessarily to the level of a medical doctor) and ability to see the big picture. Plus, they were instructed in a great many things like psychometry (at least as applied to Force-sensitivity testing), Force-induced diseases... and many would fall through the knowledge cracks but nonetheless show promise.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"The first time we've met each other in your office, I mentioned that I used my brain a lot for high-level cognitive functions and, as a result, my neural activity can get pretty high, then again, so do you"

"You have noticed that we are both rather unorthodox as Jedi: our respective smarts enable that possibility. Yet there is one thing I envy about you"

"What is it?"

"There is that thing called Instinctive Astrogation Control: you seem to be able to use it without having to first use Force-comprehension. When I use it without Force-comprehension I get it completely wrong but with it I only need to make a detour or two"

"Force-comprehension is a neural booster"

Force-comprehension is a neural booster all right, but many people who knew practitioners of Force-comprehension noticed that, the smarter they naturally were, the less effect it had on them. Cathul and Jessica both tried it on themselves and found it to be completely ineffectual: they were far from morons, and neither were the first two people Jessica calls the "administrators of Force-sensitivity tests" in chronological order of administration: they were smart and almost unnaturally so by themselves, without recourse to Force-comprehension. Some people claimed that it was because they had less and less incentive to use it, but the real reason had to do with the relationship between neural connection density and the speed of a person's neural processes. It turns out that the speed of a person's neural processes correlates with the density of its neural connections: clearly a person wth a higher neural connection density had faster neural processes. It seems that there is a limit as to how much the Force could boost one's neural speed.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

OOC: I couldn't find a way to make the del symbol work (for those among you who know about partial derivatives, you know what I mean) so here derivatives are assumed partial.

IC: "I'm not impressed by your so-called new methods. Do you use another Force-power with these methods? Preferably one that I do not know about"

"This means Electric Judgment is out of the question. Nevertheless, the main advantage, if you know about Maxwell's equations, is that you can apply just the right amount of power so long as you actually have it"

"I know about Ohm's law, but what advantage do Maxwell's equations have over Ohm's and Joule's laws?"

"The trick is that electomagnetic fields are at the core of Electric Judgment. I mentioned that you could use Electric Judgment for defibrillation and that's something a beginner in EJ could do at your level of power, or even my own level of power. Fow now do you even know what Maxwell's equations are?"

So Catria only knew about Electric Judgment by name, and not about how to use Electric Judgment itself? Not surprising. But Jessica would never, ever expect a Jedi Healer to even learn Electric Judgment, or, for that matter, Maxwell's equations. Because the targets of Electric Judgment will never be vacuum or gaseous in nature, Jessica finds it appropriate to jump directly to the Maxwell's equations in matter, and, in most cases, electromagnetic permittivity and permeability, and hence electric and magnetic susceptibility, are locally linear for the purposes of Electric Judgment since the charge will be applied at one point in the target. Jessica had the Force-greenlight from Catria to go with the full amount of technical explanations. But what it really meant was that one really did was to chock free current into the target. Here Jessica began with the basic equations in their differential form in matter: div D = pef, div H = div B = 0 (or, if ionite is actually the result of magnetic monopoles, div H = pmf), curl E = - dB/dt (again, if ionite is the result of magnetic monopoles, curl E = Jmf - dB/dt), curl H = Jef + dD/dt.

"How do D, E, B, H all relate to each other? What are those quantities?"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"D is the displacement field; when you plaster a material with charge, so long as the material isn't a conductor, the material polarizes and it also has the effect of displacing charges at the dielectric's surface and an opposite amount of it away from it. It has to be a non-conducting material otherwise you would have no bound charge, no more than you would have an electric field E to begin with"

"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with what a curl or a divergence is. But I truly want to learn Electric Judgment so that I can use it to defibrillate"

"Now you understand why there is an intellectual barrier to the methods I use. You know what you want out of Electric Judgment, I trust that you won't abuse it, so that's a start"

"Anything simpler?"

"Just visualize the electric field between you and your target at the desired strength. I'll give you a reading list if you want in-depth knowledge of electromagnetism as appropriate for using Electric Judgment"

And then the magnetic field would naturally appear since a lightning bolt is, at its core, an electric current, she thought. Far from a steady current, though. But then Jessica spots a visitor of the Citadel that fell down a staircase in the Force while Catria is busy zapping her own lightsaber to recharge it, using Electric Judgment. Between her office, which was on the second-topmost floor of the Citadel, and the staircase used by TE personnel, there was a few doors. The topmost floor is reserved to the Emperor, with each Senator having their offices in the Citadel by order of seniority, and Jessica was sharing the second-topmost floor with one Herr Vanderhing and General Jake Hexadros. Catria had no idea what transpired just yet, since she was busy behind closed doors recharging any small powerpacks she herself had, using Electric Judgment. But Jessica tried to sense whether the Neimoidian staffer was hurt in the Force and, if so, where.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Are you all right?"

"Jessica? It hurts; help!"

"Stand still: I will carry you to my office, where you will lie still and flat while treatment is administered" Jessica told the staffer while she used the Force to lift him and move him flat while she walked.

"Roger, roger"

"You have a sprained ankle"

The Neimoidian staffer fell down the staircases from the top floor, where Werah's throne room was as Supreme Commander of the Techno Empire, and Jessica's office just underneath the throne room. Luckily the Neimoidian staffer had no broken bones. When Jessica arrived near her office, she gently lowered the body on the ground so that she could recover some Force-energy to get the job finished. Don't expect near-instant healing every time... these thoughts ring again in her mind as she uses the Force to put the ligaments back into place, and, from there, repair any ligament damage. While Catria was busy poring through the E&M textbook, that she realized was rather advanced, but to Jessica was rather par for the course and sufficient to understand E&M at the level that she feels is appropriate for a practitioner of Electric Judgment. That is, to an upper-division undergraduate level. That alone made it a daunting Force-power to learn using the tenets of knowledge-as-power the way both women understood it. The blue-haired healer realized that Jessica kept several textbooks whose contents were important for the Force-powers she used, while Jessica continued to take care of the sprained ankle.

"He must be immobilized for a while, also, I'll go fetch a bag of ice. Stay here"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

She went around fetching a bag of ice, as she told the Neimoidian staffer. Even though said bag of ice which is going to be applied to the wound was going to be made using cryokinesis from fountain water. With another application of cryokinesis, the whole thing became one big ball of ice to be applied on the patient's ankle. But Catria, after recharging the battery of her lightsaber, turned to see what the Wookiee-sized Padawan was doing, hoping that she'd manage to actually take care of the patient. She was first and foremost a Jedi Technician, but to her a Jedi's training that would allow self-reliance would necessitate a rather loaded "spellbook", that is, one's repertoire of Force-powers: in addition to mechu-deru, pyrokinesis, cryokinesis, Electric Judgment, Force-healing were all part of what she considered essential to have in a spellbook. On top of telekinesis, Force-sense and mind tricks, which were non-negotiable in terms of what all Jedi were required to know, in addition to lightsaber combat.

"Jessica? It seems that Electric Judgment's learning curve is a little steep. I hope that you have a less demanding Force-power than Electric Judgment"

"That's completely unlike you to complain about a Force-power's learning curve!"

"I'll try using Electric Judgment with what I understand about electromagnetism if given the chance. I'll perfect my knowledge of that at a later date"

"OK, what about pyro/cryokinesis? That way you get a 2-for-1 deal, 2 equations: (3RT/M)1/2 for liquids, gases, plasmas and supercritical fluids, so you either increase or decrease the root-mean-square speed of the molecules, whereas for solid targets, the quantity that you need to play with is the target's vibrational frequencies, which have a dependency on temperature"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

For liquids it's a root-mean-square speed all right, just that it is a rotational one. Catria, surprisingly, knows about the latent energy involved in a phase transition, since she didn't ask about the implications of phase transitions. But Jessica senses Catria is looking for just how pyro/cryokinesis would be of use for medical reasons. Disinfecting material, or putting icy patches on patients when treating them needs immobilizing, or even being a proxy for liquid nitrogen, respectively. That was her idea of why she wants to use these Force-powers. Knowing what one wants out of the spell is important for keeping the morale of the student while the power is being learned. To the two women it's a tradeoff of knowledge and Jessica learning Force-healing and perhaps a little extra is worth Catria's cost of learning Electric Judgment, pyrokinesis and cryokinesis. Probably because Catria views them as tools for her trade as a Force-healer.

"I've got something to say before we proceed any further"

"What is it that troubles you?"

"Over the past five years I obsessed over you: you were the one person I compared everyone when it came to intelligence, at the beginning of those five years I blamed the first two admins for having removed all comfort I used to have"

"Make no mistake: discovering this late in life that you're Force-sensitive is a painful, life-changing realization. But why am I the benchmark when you know as well as I do that intelligence is multifaceted? You always seemed to talk about intellectual makeup or intellectual composition when I approached the topic with you"

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

"Yes, that's true, there are those items that can translate well across a wide range of activities: logic, critical thinking, memory, and also processing ability. These four things are the greatest contributors in what the laymen call smarts, but I have the impression that, in that sense, it's the modulus of these four components of the composition that people often tend to conflate with intelligence itself"

"That's only a fragment of an answer - that gives some insight as to what standards are used, but why am I so special, even by these standards?"

"I use that definition because it makes it understandable to laymen. Essentially it's because you're, according to that definition, bordering on unnatural: you always seemed to be the sort of semi-genius whose measurables makes it difficult to determine whether you're a genius or not"

"Psychometricians find it difficult to differentiate at the extremes, I accept as much. It seems that, to you, there's highly intelligent and genius and I'm at the border between the two"

Amusing to see that these two ladies could have a discussion like that after all these years, where they hated each other over engineering questions and Jessica got obsessed on a personal level with her because it was difficult to her, at the onset, to adjust her life to that of a Force-user. She was always led to believe that if one was special in any shape or form, one also had duties pertaining to it. And Force-users had it worse because their responsibilities were much greater. And also what people called Force-sensitivity was actually meaning that, while the Force touched anything in the living realms (microorganisms, vegetal, animal, and so on so forth) few were able to touch it enough to use it. The Senate was rarely in session since the Empire was rather decentralized in its governance. And night fell over Zenturi, the Imperial trainer was now clearly at an advantage over the first administrator: she could use three Force-powers that both knew the first admin did not use.