There'd been a notice tacked to the door of the room that he'd been assigned. He'd been on Tython for a day and someone had already stuck a class notice right on his door. It felt targeted. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but it felt targeted, like it was coming from someone that had actually noticed that he was a bit behind the curve. So, while he did elect to go to it, it was with no small amount of internal grumbling.
Maybe a little external.
As he arrived to the class location, looking out at the set of boxes that were arrayed in the clearing, the 'Knight Kai'el' that was hosting it decided to speak up to the rest. Talking about the boxes, and the point of the lesson.
He squinted, and his cheeks itched. Something seemed familiar about the short Knight, but he wasn't sure what. He was certain he'd never run into another Jedi dressed quite like that, and whatever the vocoder was concealing, such mechanical voices were distinguished as much by how mechanical they were as anything else, so it wasn't like that could be a source of recognition.
And, of course, he wasn't really sure of anybody he'd run into that had to use one like this. Sure, some people had helmets or other masks they had to wear sometimes that would purposefully modulate or even garble their voices with other vocoders, but one who seemed to have to rely on it? He wasn't sure he'd run into anything like that.
So—puzzle boxes, huh?
He took his and went and took a seat, looking it over quietly. Not quietly for long, however, when the hyperactive Cathar girl he'd seen back on New Cov groaned about having to do another test with boxes, and then the Huttlet Padawan a ways away managed to crush theirs almost instantly. He stood again, walking over and looking at the crushed box quizzically.
He thought he could catch a glimpse of something crystalline within the splinters, as the Knight offered another box to the Huttlet. He put one hand on their hair, and was shocked when the hair squealed like a pig. It didn't feel like hair, either, it was soft and sticky under his hand. A baleful yellow eye looked at him from one side of it.
A Sha'rellian toop. He'd read about them before. A special breed, or a mutated one, given that it looked more like messy hair than the slicked-back styled look that the main breed had. He pulled his hand back, resisting the urge to wipe it on his pants.
"You really should take a look at what you've got there, too," he said, gesturing at the broken box with his own after the Knight finished talking. "Might get a hint or two that can help with the next one, or at least an idea of just what's inside. Doesn't that sound better than crying over it?"
...
He hoped that didn't sound too insensitive. It was mostly meant to try and get the Huttlet to think about what she could pull out of the mistake rather than dwelling on the mistake itself. He held his tongue afterwards, though, rather than risk digging a deeper hole trying to explain away something that, maybe, didn't need any extra explaining. He walked back away with a small wave, sitting down again with his box.
Running his fingers over it, feeling at each little alteration in the surface that he could find, trying to mentally gauge just how long it might take him to figure out the puzzle itself...before thinking back on the voice that had been following him around for a while now.
Hey, Jo'han. Any idea what's hidden inside these things?