The art of ordering takeout and healing

[Taheera Sollo]

Commenor - Chasin City Hospital

[member="Avalore Eden"]

"Excu--EXCUSE ME," the clone-healer shouldered her way through a crowded pair of Rodians, juggling several bags of takeout food. After sharing a nuna-egg roll with the hospital security staff, she trudged to the lift. She slid into the lift doors just before they closed.

All the buttons were pressed.

Eyes bulged and face soured. Must've been that Mon Calamarian kid from earlier. Foot tapped impatiently as the lift opened and closed on each floor before reaching the eighth. Huffing down a long corridor, she finally shouldered the door at the end of the hall open to a conference room that was supposed to be full of padawans prepping for a healing session with someone named Avalore Eden.

"Sorry I'm late! I wanted to pick up some food for everyone. Heard it's really good...," voice trailed off as she noted that the room was empty. Eyes panned to the wall-chrono as she noticed the time.

Darvit.

 

[Avalore Eden]

"What did you bring?" a curious, soft voice sounded from behind the woman, belonging to none-other than Avalore Eden herself. She smiled impishly, looking hungry and maybe just a tad excited for the bags of food.

[member="Taheera Sollo"]

 

[Taheera Sollo]

[member="Avalore Eden"]

She whirled around at the voice, a tub of red, sticky looking sauce launching from the top of the bag and toward the jedi master healer. "I promise I'm not usually this uncoordinated!" She blurted and set the bags carefully down on the table. It's funny how the novice healer could feel embarrassed and jittery about something as simple as this: going to a training class, being late, and meeting another healer, when she had been through so much more.

"It's a little of everything," she said sheepishly. "Supposedly the best nuna-egg rolls on this side of space. I've got plenty, help yourself. I'm Taheera Sollo. Could you - uh - tell me where I could find someone named Avalore Eden?"

 

[Avalore Eden]

Mouth watering at just the name of food, Avalore narrowly avoided the flying sauce which flew past her and landed on the floor, abused and pitiful. Droll smile stretching her lips for a moment, the Chief Healer leaned to pick it up, "That would be me," she replied and moved to join [member="Taheera Sollo"] at the table.

"The class ended about twenty minutes ago, but I can be bribed for private tutoring with food."

She could be bribed to do a lot of things with food. Paperwork, substituting, archive retrieval...

"You're a bit older than the students from that class. Are you sure you weren't supposed to be in the evening session?"

 

[Taheera Sollo]

[member="Avalore Eden"]

Master Eden almost got sauce-attacked by me.

The hinges of her jaw began to work, trying to slowly close. The terrified and mortally embarrassed look remained. "I-uh," she unpacked the rest of the food and sunk down into a chair. "I look older than I am. It's kind of....complicated."

She had a stigma about admitting she was a clone. She didn't want to do it if she didn't have to. Perhaps it was her fatal character flaw.

"I just want to learn. Healing is one of the few force things I can actually do. And I want to know more - understand it more, and apply it more. I was hoping you could help with that, Master Eden. And I'll....try not to fling take-out sauce on you anymore."

A weak smile finally broke through the mortified embarrassment.

 

[Avalore Eden]

"Oh?" Avalore inclined an eyebrow and a curious glance to the woman as she began to unpack food and help herself. There was no shame to be had here - Avalore lost all sense of it during her very long and very large and public pregnancy as a Padawan herself. Consuming a veritable mountain of food in front of others had shattered any hope for dignity.

When you're eating for two you simply can't chew delicately enough.

A soft smile emerged at the other's admission, "Healing is one of the few things I can do with the Force, too-" she shoved a mouthful of ...well, she didn't know what it was but at this point it hardly mattered, "trust me, as a Healer take-out sauce on your robes will be the least of your worries."

She'd burned robes entirely soaked in blood ...Force knew what else already.

"Have you had any training yet or are we diving in head first?"

[member="Taheera Sollo"]

 

[Taheera Sollo]

[member="Avalore Eden"]

Maybe it was the way Avalore seemed so comfortable, or the lack of shyness in digging into the food, or how frank she was being, whatever it was, it made the clone a little less edgy. She popped a can of Ginger Bubbly and took a sip. "No formal training. I doubt you could count Marvin the Archivist showing me where some self study holocrons were as training. Let's just say I've dipped my toes into the shallow end."

Marvin also taught her the basics of lightsaber fighting before Kashyyyk. Even with a nervous shoulder tick and a battle won by gray hairs in his beard, he was a surprisingly fast and fluid fighter. If only she could get him to stop wearing everything in plaid.

"I've had some field experience already - nothing major and my work probably wasn't very....pretty. I healed a shoulder wound on Kashyyyk and fixed-up Master Kana's nose after an accident. But that's about it. Just surface-wound stuff."

 

[Avalore Eden]

"Oh," Avalore raised her brows, "well that's a fair bit more than what I started with on my first field trial lesson. But holocrons are as good a place as any to start. You have to balance classroom smarts with live experience, and unfortunately the only way to do that is to put some wrinkles in your robes, as one of my old tutors on Corellia used to say."

That also answered the question as to what that bump on [member="Kana Truden"]'s nose was. Hm. She took another large bite and chewed thoughtfully.

"My very first Master, Master Mark Starkiller, used to make me practice on him when he returned from missions. What a botch that was. I'm fairly certain I did more damage than I healed - but he was a good sport. Not like a few extra scars made any lick of difference to him. He collected them like stamps, it was absurd."

Chew, chew.

"My second Master, Master Moridena, I met by pulling her off the battlefield while 6 months pregnant and healing her. Course I'd had a bit more practice and experience by then, but it would have hardly mattered on account of she had more scars on her than my first Master did the last I ever saw him."

 

[Taheera Sollo]

[member="Avalore Eden"]

She stopped peeling the flimsi wrapper from a nuna-egg roll and leaned forward.

"Wait, wait, wait. Your master was six months pregnant and in the middle of a battlefield? And you had two masters? What happened to the first one?"

Was life-expectancy with the jedi that bad these days? Then again, she had been at ground zero on Kashyyyk. She could believe it considering how little preparation she had gotten before being thrown into war. It was no secret the numbers of the jedi paled in comparison with the sith.

 

[Avalore Eden]

"Uh-no," Avalore said over a mouthful of noodle-something. A quick glance around and she found what she needed; a drink, "...I was six months pregnant at the time, not Diana," snort.

Diana pregnant? She couldn't even imagine such a thing.

"And I had two masters because Mar- .... Master Starkiller left for a mission and didn't returned, never to be seen or heard from again." Her tone took a dive and she paused for a minute, mind now reeling over the fact that it had been two years now since the day she gave up hope waiting for him to come back. It still turned her stomach to think about it. Someone had once told her that it was OK to concede the fact that Mark was one with the Force, but something told Avalore that he wasn't. The mystery of it still bothered her greatly, but time helped to ease that particular pain, allowing the Healer to drift from one bad memory into the next.

Seemed they never stopped coming.

Frowning, she turned her attention to what [member="Taheera Sollo"] was unwrapping, made a comment and searched for one for herself.

Success.

"What about you?" crinkle crinkle, "Do you have a Master?"

 

[Taheera Sollo]

[member="Avalore Eden"]

Cruncha-a-munch.

"Oh. YOU were pregnant. Wow." There wasn't much more to add without digging herself into a deeper hole. This was one topic she didn't want to touch with a nine-foot Kashyyyk-wood pole.

Finding a napkin, she wiped off the layer of grease gathering on her fingers.

"Sorry about Master Starkiller." Lame. But what could she really say? "I get the feeling that happens a lot with the Republic. No, I don't have a master. I barely checked-in and learned where the cantina was when they sent me off to Kashyyyk to fight. I didn't question it and they didn't ask. Maybe I should have," her gaze focused on the unopened box of choco-sponge cake but she wasn't in the room anymore. She felt the lightsaber slice into her skin. Woods surrounded her.

A slow-blink brought her back.

"Want some cake? I could really go for some chocolate right now."

 

[Avalore Eden]

"I find chocolate to be the best temporary solution to many of life's unfortunate qualms," Avalore batted her brows at the girl and grinned, "I ate a lot of chocolate while I was pregnant. McPuff couldn't get enough of it."

Cake quartered and served, the Chief Healer indulged in a forkful blissfully.

"Force, they don't feed you this stuff back at the temples. Half those Jedi have no idea what they're missing..." another forkful and a drink to wash it down, "funny though. That's how I ended up meeting Diana on the battlefield. Though I wasn't asked to fight, I sort of snuck in when no one was looking. Cabin fever is the worst at six months. Hindsight it was a really stupid decision, but it earned me a new Master..." and a whole slew of new bad memories.

"So they just fed you to the wolves on Kashyyyk did they? That's awful, how did you manage to make it out alive? I heard it was a bloodbath. Matter of fact, I treated a lot of refugees and wounded soldiers from that battle here."

[member="Taheera Sollo"]

 

[Taheera Sollo]

[member="Avalore Eden"]

"I guess I shouldn't say them like that. I probably would've volunteered to go to Kashyyyk, anyway." She savored a bite of choco-cake. "I made it out half-alive," she put the fork back on the table with a dull-thud. "And it was thanks to kismet and a run-in with [member="Jaxton Ravos"]. He got me out."

Half-truths. But Jaxton's story wasn't hers to tell. She wasn't lying about him getting her out. She just didn't share that he happened to be undercover as a sith at the same time.

"I wish I could've done more." Sincerity flecked myrtle-ellipses as she stared across the table at the jedi master. "It's hard not to feel like a failure after something like that. Sometimes I can pick-up on the pain of others when they get hurt. It seems to be amplified during battle. Got any ideas for fixing that? I can't afford to be distracted like that...again."

 

[Avalore Eden]

"I know the feeling..."

Wish I could've done more.

Avalore had been on Prakith with Hal, breaking into the temple to save a Princess from an unfortunate fate. Hal had played the part of Sith well enough and she didn't like thinking about how easily it had seemed to come to him. She supposed previous experience applied in his case, and that's where she left it.

"Sounds like maybe you're a bit of an Empath. I don't have the skill myself and I don't know much about it, but-" pondering for a moment, she sighed deeply, "I know a few techniques for blocking things mentally that could potentially be applied to your problem. Is it physical pain or mental/emotional anguish?"

[member="Taheera Sollo"]