Old Times

[Alexandra Feanor]

Alexandra was sitting alone in her garden, tracing the lines in the bark of her tree, feeling for a presence that was no longer there and smiling as she leaned her head against the tree.

Two presences had disappeared from her home a few days ago, one being the part of Krest that had been kept safe in her home, but also Hel who had been wiped out finally. Alexandra was unsure if she was gone for certain and had asked [member="Vulpesen"] to stick around for a few days to make sure. He had accepted, likely wanting to make sure as well and after the first day he had asked her if she would teach him how to control plants and their growth.

The request had confused her, as it was a power that she never expected the war focused man to want to learn but maybe he saw use in it for whatever reason of his own. She used it as a way to pacify people without harming them, as well as a way to create the gardens and more importantly the trees that formed her network of Nexus'.

Her eyes remained closed, leaning her forehead against the tree and breathing in calmly, letting the cool air push past the trees and run over her and the garden itself.

[member="Vulpesen"]

 

[Vulpesen]

Striding into the garden, Vulpesen's posture was as relaxed as always, his hands placed easily into his pockets, where one would lightly pet the sleeping form of Ace who had curled up in the bottom of the warm silk. He'd be lying if he said he hadn't been trying to avoid Alexandra. Old memories and awkward conversations. Things he simply didn't want to deal with. But he wasn't here to dredge up the past. Right or wrong, it happened. He was here for the future. His people had traditions in all parts of their lives. Jewelry, clothing, combat styles, and of course, the force. If he was to truly be their king, he would need to learn their ways, even in the force. "Well... I'm here."

[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Alexandra Feanor]

[member="Vulpesen"]

Alexandra smiled when she felt Vulpesen entering the area, her eyes sliding to the side and her head turning to look at him over her shoulder. She knew he had hesiations and didn't want to dredge up the past, wanting to believe it had come and passed. Alexandra looked at him for afew moments, thinking on the man for a moment more.

"That you are fox face. Sit down, plantsurge is about feeling connected to the life around you and if you cannot clear your mind, teaching you anything would be without a worth." She turned back to the tree now and leaned her forehead against it once more.

The light filled her and bled into the tree, streams and ribbons of light leaving her hand and pushing into the tree itself. She was feeding it like she always had, stengthening the nexus ever more and adding to its strength and size. She needed Vulpesen to sit down and center himself, and while he did that she would focus on the work required to strengthen her creation.

 

[Vulpesen]

Nodding to her words, Vulpesen stepped forward and lowered himself down to sit on the ground. Ever since he was a jedi, he hated meditation. it was sitting down andthinking about nothing.It was idleness with which your opponent could plan against you. It was stillness and stillness was death. But still, he had learned to do it... He had found ways to force himself to shut everything down. That constantly running mind which calculated variable after variable, kept track of every connection, and felt the force to follow its ebbs and flows, was sometimes his worst enemy when it came to learning. But as with all enemies, he had learned to beat it.

Closing his eyes, Vulpesen took in several deep breaths and focused himself on the world around him. One by one, the variables disappeared. His thoughts and plans faded away, replaced by the lives around him. Every bug, and rodent's heartbeat touched his senses. Every steady pulse of the plants around him. Animals and beasts were his life. He knew them well and had conversations with animals long before he had become a jedi. But plants were something else. Something strange between life and death. Yet among the Veran wilders, he had learned to see them... now Alex would need to teach him out to speak with them.
[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Alexandra Feanor]

[member="Vulpesen"]

Alexandra smiled as the man cleared his mind but that was not so much as the first step. Sure it was necessary to clear your mind and then connect with the plant in question but the same was true for moving an object with the force. She was merely having Vulpesen focus on the very things he wished to control and while he did so she hummed to herself, a low tune she had learned from a friend. The woman smiled as the tail she now had moved a bit involuntarily, her eyes closed and her hand drawing back from the tree.

Those same strands of light she used feed the tree followed her hand as she pulled back, visibly attaching her to the tree like ribbons that curled around her hand and dug into her wrist. With her other hand she reached over, grabbing onto them and then closing that hand tight. It would shear the connection, leaving her untethered to the tree.

"Sorry for asking for a few days to make sure things were all fine up in my head Fox Face. You know how I am about being cautious with things." She said, picking up a satchel nearby and coming to sit infront of him. She was no more than two feet away, a patch of earth cleared out between them and she would withdraw items and containers as she rumaged through the satchel.

"Things have been hectic and I don't have many of my supplies here anymore, only recently repairing this place to a suitable point." She said, not looking at him and finishing with the withdrawing of her supplies.

"Shall we get started?"

 

[Vulpesen]

Reopening his eyes, he watched Alexandra as she prepared herself to teach, eventually coming to rest before him. "I don't kill often. When I do, I like to make sure that they stay dead." Hearing about her lack of supplies, he couldn't help but grin as he made a simply statement. "I don't imagine you need much to grow plants in a garden. And I'm ready when you are."

[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Alexandra Feanor]

"You are correct Fox Brains, I don't... but you..." She looked him in the eyes with a grin, a bit of her hair falling to obscure her face.

"Well lets just say you have never been one to treat things gently. I would be a fool to say that this would be a quick lesson. You have a tendency of being rash and pragmatic, letting emotions lead you on." She didn't say anything untrue and would not continue looking at him, not excepting excuses or retorts right now.

She drew her hand across and grabbed a vial with some small seeds, she took it in her hand and looked at it for a few moments. Her hand went to removing the top of the vial and speaking as she worked to procure a single seed, not wanting to take more than was necessary.

"As I was saying before, this requires gentleness, and stillness. You are not commanding a plant, and more so influencing it as if convincing it to grow or stop, to move how you want it to. You will be accelerating its growth to tremendous rates, things similar to healing but on a far quicker pace and with just as much room for error. But unlike a body, each plant will not have a reference to eachother. You will not be able to study your own cells like with healing to mimic the healthy rate of growth. With this you are completing the act with a great deal of guess work and you can still easily grow and kill a plant without it so much as helping you in the time you do so."

She was able by that point to gather only one of the seeds, setting it down on an old style notebook and capping the vial again.

"Understood?"

 

[Vulpesen]

"That you've seen." It occurred to him, Alex had mainly seen him on the battlefield. Even at home, their relationship had been amid turmoil, with him bustling about to keep things, and people in one piece. It wasn't all that different now either. But at least, he found time to relax a bit. And it didn't feel like there was hunting him down every second. It wasn't so much that he didn't think. It was more that he couldn't think while standing still.

Still, despite his disagreements on his own characteristics, he at least listened to her explanation. There was one place where he excelled in showing his mind. Philosophy, particularly when it came to manipulating the force. He nodded slowly to her words, noting a few similarities to his normal practices. "Give the plant the energy, let it do the work. Makes sense to me."
[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Alexandra Feanor]

[member="Vulpesen"]

She smiled, wanting to laugh at how simple he had broken down her words and just joke with him, something stopped her. Her eyes flicked up at him for a moment and she felt awkward and wanting to run away again as he made her smile. Something was wrong and she sighed, looking back down at the seed, pushing it into the earth and slowly drawing forward a sack of water, emptying out enough to feed the plant as she worked.

Her hand rose to rest over it and she started speaking again.

"Im going to show you the process first, and the stages you have to pay attention to. The first of which being how much of that power to apply to the plant. For example, pushing a great deal of power into the plant...." She paused, showing as the plant grew rapidly but before even taking its shape and color it mutated and browned, dying out. "... will kill it before you have even gained the smallest bit of usefulness from it."

With that she gingerly removed the dead plant and placed it to the side, putting a new seed into the ground.

"Is that bit understood? If so, I would appreciate seeing you make the conenction with the plant before we go further."

She looked back at him, staring for a moment before looking down again.

 

[Vulpesen]

Watching Alexandra continue her explanation and work on growing the seed, Vulpesen nodded in affirmation. As she had grown the seed, he had focused himself intently on her presence in the force, watching how it's currents moved and surged around her. He measured and timed it, attempting to see exactly how much energy she had used to pull off the minor feat. Closing his eyes once more, Vulpesen placed his hand above the planted seed and focused himself. Drawing his attention in from the world around him, he found the pinpoint of minute life that he was to be affecting and made it the center of his world, forgetting the rest of the area around him, and hardly even noticing the looks he was gaining from the woman before him. "And now?"

[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Alexandra Feanor]

[member="Vulpesen"]


"Slowly transfer ever increasing amounts of the force into the seed, but not alot. You are not healing a wound, where you would push the force into someone to help them heal. Plants are far more delicate and smaller, especially in the beginning, too much power will kill them. You need to apply barely a drop of force energy, so much so that it may not even feel like you are doing anything Vulpesen." She looked at him and reached down, helping to guide the flow of the force and tapping into her own tree to draw the force to her. She singled off all other life from Vulpesen's grasp and let him work in a vaccuum of sorts.

She in the meantime would watch him, studying how the force moves through him and making sure he understood just how little energy he had to impart. She was sure he would get it, not knowing the man to fail very often and unlike her would probably pick this up quickly. She would not hinder his growth for that reason, even if she wished he would be here for far longer, she would not sabotage him just to get him to stay longer.

So she waited for him to succeed, ready to continue.

 

[Vulpesen]

Relaxing himself with a deep breath, Vulpesen started to filter the force through himself, funnelling a small stream of his energy into the plant before him. Little by little, it trickled form him. It was a little trickier than he expected. In truth, such a feat might have been easier as a padawan. Back then, he hadn't tasted war. He hadn't been forced to give his all on the battlefield time and time again. His life wasn't so... extreme. For so long he'd had to rush things, he'd had to flex himself in the force, exerting as much power as possible in a short window of time. But here he was, calmly sitting in a field and giving a single flower the energy to grow. It happened in bursts, and there were times the plant almost seemed to wither or burst, shaking from the power that the Valde placed into it. But each time, he drew back from the edge, refocused and tried again. It was a slow process, but eventually, Vulpesen would be seated before a flowering plant rather than a buried seed. "And how do you do this in a battlefield without killing it? I don't think it'll be easy to tangle up my foes if it takes me five minutes to see a pedal."

[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Vulpesen]

Relaxing himself with a deep breath, Vulpesen started to filter the force through himself, funnelling a small stream of his energy into the plant before him. Little by little, it trickled form him. It was a little trickier than he expected. In truth, such a feat might have been easier as a padawan. Back then, he hadn't tasted war. He hadn't been forced to give his all on the battlefield time and time again. His life wasn't so... extreme. For so long he'd had to rush things, he'd had to flex himself in the force, exerting as much power as possible in a short window of time. But here he was, calmly sitting in a field and giving a single flower the energy to grow. It happened in bursts, and there were times the plant almost seemed to wither or burst, shaking from the power that the Valde placed into it. But each time, he drew back from the edge, refocused and tried again. It was a slow process, but eventually, Vulpesen would be seated before a flowering plant rather than a buried seed. "And how do you do this in a battlefield without killing it? I don't think it'll be easy to tangle up my foes if it takes me five minutes to see a pedal."

[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Alexandra Feanor]

[member="Vulpesen"]


"How did you learn to use your other abilities so easily and efficiently Fox Face?" She said as she picked out a few seeds, letting them fall to the ground and without the same preparation she gave Vulpesen' example, her hand moved out and she took his. There was going to show him hands on, so to speak and she held his hand over the seeds, and then, with his hand acting as a barrier so that he could feel the flow of the force and what she was doing, the seeds began to grow.

She did not send out bursts of energy like Vulpesen, instead, taking a calm and steady flow of energy to all the seeds, dividing it with even more precision and looking down at the hand as she continued to talk. She did not need to focus on the task and she continued to keep his hand in hers as she worked to demonstrate what he would be able to do at some point. In no more than a dozen seconds the flowers would be fully grown and ready to live without her aid.

"Practice makes perfect, and it takes time and devotion to grow something without problems... treat the flowers like Children, be confident in your abilities and keep the stream of energy steady and controlled. If I didn't think you could do as I can with time, I would not have agreed to this."

 

[Vulpesen]

"Kinda had to. Either I leaned to catch a lightning bolt, or said bolt fried my furry tailed ass." Still, as the other seeds were placed, Vulpesen focused again, feeling out the amount of power that Alexandra poured into them as well as the pace with which it was sent out. He understood it. It was simple the control that he needed to learn. What she said of practice was certainly true. He hadn't learned to piece people with the force on his first day. It had taken years of training and focusing his telekinesis until he understood that he could use a force push to push as sharply as a thrusted dagger. "I guess, I just need a bit of that practice."

[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Alexandra Feanor]

[member="Vulpesen"]


"Even you need to slow down sometimes Vulpesen and think on things, to consider how to achieve something and where to hold back." She stopped and removed her hand from his, drawing back to her items and drawing out another seed, carefully planting it and replicating the careful process for setting the see up with the most chance of success. Alexandra's hands worked quickly and when they were done she wiped them on the rag she had with her. Her eyes landed back on Vulpesen and she nodded, hoping that he would go and continue on with the work that he had been showing thus far.

In the meantime she would grab her datapad and work on a record of what was weaker in his use. She figured this would be more helpful for vulpesen than herself, knowing she would remember this without problem because of how her mind worked. This way though he would be given the tools to further his abilities without her if he did not seek help from his home and those there. She had met more than a few wilders while she was there and her skillset matched theirs quite well.

 

[Vulpesen]

"Walk before ya run, I guess." Closing his eyes, Vulpesen focused on the miminiscle life before him. He had monitored and watched Alexandra's application of the force, and now it was his time to apply it for himself. Cracking the floodgate, Vulpesen allowed a trickle of the force to leave his hand, a steady but small stream asa if from a slightly turned faucet. Now, without worrying about what his eyes were seeing, Vulpesen progressed far more smoothly. he didn't focus on how the plant looked, only how it felt, how it rose and pulsed inthe force, feeding from the energy he offered it. Slightly slower than Alexandra, he finally managed to create a blooming flower, this time without the stuttering progress.

[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Alexandra Feanor]

[member="Vulpesen"]

Alexandra smiled at how nonchalant Vulpesen was and as he worked on the seed she had placed before him, her eyes would be drawn to the tree she maintained in this garden and turned to face it, slowly rising. She walked over to it with careful, measured steps, eyes not shifting and she thought on the matter before her, what she was doing now. She was training an old friend... no, she was training someone more than just a friend and her eyes shifted to look at him as the stem was taking shape before returning to the trunk of her tree.

With a careful touch she laid her hand on surface, feeling the bark and letting the force consume her as she started imparting a piece of herself into the tree, adding to the reserve kept inside. She had been preparing that tree for years and as she worked, its bark would glow with white light and her own body would start to glow, the two beings becoming one for a few moments. She worked, tying a bit of her own soul off and separating it with a quick strike, severing the physical connection and letting the tree consume that bit of her soul.

She did not falter in her stance or breathing though, feeling the tree grow against her hand as she sustained that growth and the force flooding into it and herself as she remained connected. Her eyes remained sealed as she felt Vulpesen finish, turning her head to look in his direction but without actually openning her eyes.

"Walk and Run, very much so... Did I ever show you this Vulpesen?" With those words the strands of life and the force became visible, her body flooded with white light as it seemed to form her very muscular structure aorund her bones and like a marianet she stood there, strung up by dozens of strands while connected to the tree with a dozen more. The tree itself was no different, burning with white light as it was connected by those same strands that she was, but in the hundreds.

"Consider this... an end goal for your lessons, many years down the line." Her smile was soft as she further turned to him. "Come here, I want you to see it a bit more closely."

 

[Vulpesen]

Exhaling a deep breath, Vulpesen looked down at the plant with a wide smile, pleased with what he had done. Rising up, Vulpesen flicked his ears towards Alex, listening to her statements and question. "I don't think you ever showed it to me, at least, not up close." He lifted to walk after her, but stopped as the force started to spread out from her, showing how she had connected herself. "Very interesting... But not my style. I don't like leaving pieces of myself in something that can be destroyed. If I'm to lose a part of myself, it'd best be for a good reason." There was no deristion in Vulpesen's voice. he spoke truthfully when he called it impressive, and he was in a way, proud that Alexandra had reached such a level of skill as to do it. But his practice lay in other places. "Although, there is another aspect of that which I feel you could teach me."

[member="Alexandra Feanor"]

 

[Alexandra Feanor]

[member="Vulpesen"]

Alexandra was clearly happy when he mentioned how interesting it was and that he found it curious. The woman seemed to even glow a bit more with her smile growing and she soon looked down to try and control her reaction. Vulpesen would probably be able to understand her old soul trying to reason her new body's natural reactions and for a few moments Alexandra looked much younger. She didn't look like the old master of a temple, or the Grandmaster of some Order, she just stood there reacting like a girl with a crush.

It was then that her head shook and she brought her eyes back up, trying to focus on his reason for being here and not devolve into someone so quick to smile and look away at a compliment. It had been a long time sure, but she had been through this before, even if this new body created reactions she was not used to. And it was his second comment that brought that smile back instantly as she raised a brow.

"And what of my pride and joy do you think I could teach you? I think you are a bit more focused on your martial methods for combat, and while imbuement like this can be used for combat extremely efficiently... it would take a great deal of time and practice, more than the plant surge alone." She looked at him, interested and curious.