Why Must We Fight?

[Jamie Pyne]

"Okay." There was a brief pause. "I'll send something to Kurt. My family, well, we're not currently speaking." She shrugged, the subject was still a rather sore one for her, given her latest departure from Naboo. "Or rather, I'm not speaking to my father. I left a small disaster in my wake last time I was home. So that fire is still kind of burning."

She did rather wonder what had happened since she had left, if her father had spoken to her mother about what really was going on like she had demanded, or whether he had chosen not to. There was the question as to whether or not they were still together, or if her half-sister was made aware yet of who her real father was. Many questions had yet to be answered, but there was a time for everything, and right now was not that time.

"I'll let him know I'm alive when we get to Sullust."

[member="Aela Talith"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Jamie Pyne"]

Aela frowned slightly.

Not speaking to her family? That...well that was an entirely foreign concept to Aela. The Talith family was incredibly close. They didn’t speak to one another every day of course, but they kept in contact as much as they could. Her mother and Father were currently in the Rishi Maze, but even they sent missives every now and again so that the kids knew what they were up to. She frowned for a few seconds.

It wasn’t any of her business...but… ”You should at least let them know you’re okay.”

Aela said regarding Jamie’s family.

”I don’t know what happened, obviously.” It really wasn’t her business. ”But Dxun really is dangerous. There’s no telling when your next chance to talk to them will be, and I’m sure they’d appreciate at least a small word.”

It was the right thing to do.

 

[Jamie Pyne]

"No." She said very bluntly. "I don't know the state of their affairs currently. Last I left I charged my father with confessing to his infidelity to my mother and the fact of having fathered another daughter, kept secret, by another woman close to our family." She shook her head, curled strands of blonde hair bouncing side to side. "I don't know if he told her or not, or if my sister knows yet. But until I make it back to Naboo I want no contact from or with him."

It would be rather plain to see that the subject was a thorny one, and that Jamie was not likely to budge on the matter.

"I'll return after Dxun. If my sister hasn't been told yet, I will be the one to tell her. She's still young, but she deserves to know, even if he doesn't want to be her father. It's not right, and I won't live with the guilt of that secret. I would want to know if it were me."

[member="Aela Talith"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Jamie Pyne"]

Aela frowned for a moment but nodded her head. It wasn't her place to interfere, even though she felt it all rather...odd. The frown stayed on her lips, but in the end she decided that it would be best not to dig into the problem further, it was more than clear that Jamie either did not want to talk about it, or found the subject a bit too close to home for her to open up about.

”Alright.” Aela said simply.

”Well, I need your sizes for clothes.” What Jamie had brought likely wouldn’t be enough for Dxun. The weather could often switch at the drop of a hat, and Aela didn’t want to take any chances of her padawan freezing to death. ”We won’t have time to go shopping so we’ll just be pulling things from the armory.”

That was usually where Aela got her clothes, mostly because civies weren’t all that important to her. She shifted slightly and stood up, looking down at her apprentice.

”This will be fun.” A small smile touched her lips as she tried to encourage Jamie a bit.

 

[Jamie Pyne]

"Pulling things from the armory?" She said, puzzled. What sort of things would one pull from a place like that? Her eyes shifted up towards Aela. "Things like?"

It hadn't quite occurred to Jamie that there was likely to be nowhere to do laundry on the regular, or that they would need to fend for themselves while on Dxun. Truth be told she hadn't even considered it. Why would she though? It wasn't as though she had really ever been entirely without typical shelter and accommodations for any prolonged period of time.

Jamie flashed a smile in response to the jovial Aela and her insistence that this trip would be, somehow, fun.

Fun for whom?

[member="Aela Talith"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Jamie Pyne"]

The Armory’ was really kind of a misnomer. Sure that was where the SIS kept their weapons, but really the place was stocked from the ground up with pretty much every kind of equipment that you could ever imagine. The Armory had simply become the default name for the place after everyone got sick of calling it the Strategic Intelligence Logistics Department and Warehouse, or SILDW.

Hard to say in conversation.

”Everything we need.” She said with a shrug. ”Tents, sleeping bags, wilderness clothes, lamps, rations, probably a blaster or two just in case we need them.”

They had their lightsabers, but when it came to Dxun...sometimes you didn’t want to get close. The planets beasts weren’t exactly the most friendly, and if a couple of stun blasts could do the same work you did with a greater distance than it was much more intelligent to actually do that rather than run in like an idiot. ”Perhaps a ray shield too.”

She hadn’t thought of that before, but it might be a good idea just in case.

Aela made a mental note.

 

[Jamie Pyne]

"Oh. Right. Of course."

The blonde leaned over to the table beside the bed, taking out a small tab with a pen. She jotted down a series of numbers, the first reading 34b-24w-34h, the second reading 2, while the third was 7.5.

She then passed them over to Aela. "Here."

Jamie wondered what exactly she had in mind for clothing for this trip. The climate was mostly jungle she thought, meaning humid, hot, and damp. But did it ever get cold? She assumed there were plenty of rain storms, but did Dxun actually have seasons of some type? And if so, what season were they arriving in? She hoped not winter! The girl had more than her fill of frozen worlds to last her a lifetime after Belsavis.

[member="Aela Talith"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Jamie Pyne"]

As if she could read her mind Aela spoke.

”Thank you.” The piece of paper was folded and slipped into her pocket. ”Dxun is mostly a jungle world, and we’ll start there, but I intend to take us north to the mountains.”

There wasn’t a lot of snow on Dxun, but once you got closer to the northern hemisphere things tended to get rather chilly. The further they traveled the more the seasons would change. Aela intended for this trip to be chock full of training for Jamie, not just beast mastery but half a dozen other techniques that the girl would receive a crash course in.

”We’ll need...well pretty much everything for us to get going properly once we’re there.” Freezing to death wasn’t something she wanted to experience.

They would start within the jungles of Dxun, training on Booma’s and Lesser creatures, and then move to the mountains. There they would struggle against the elements and begin moving with some of the larger animals, Skreeve and perhaps even Drexl. Things would get tough, but Jamie would come away stronger than ever.

 

[Jamie Pyne]

"Are we backpacking? Or what's the plan for carting everything with us?"

Jamie was curious to know whether or not this was also going to be a test of physical fortitude when it came to lugging around a truck load of survival gear and necessities for however long they would be residing on Dxun. She was fit and all, but she wasn't exactly a shining example of physical prowess. There was only so much she could actually hold and or carry for prolonged periods of time before it became an internal struggle of will over practicality. Eventually, she would tire out, and depending on the weight level, that may be sooner rather than later.

"By mountains, do you mean, snow?"

She nearly shivered simply at the thought of more wintry climate. Growing up on Naboo had conditioned the girl to rather temperate climates. Getting used to any period of terrible cold was a struggle in and of itself.

[member="Aela Talith"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Jamie Pyne"]

"Eventually, yes." She said simply. "Most of the stuff we'll leave behind when we head to the mountains, but when we do go we'll be taking our own gear."

Aela blinked when Jamie mentioned. "Of course."

Her family had grown up mostly on Borleias, but they had a winter home as well. Aela had never liked the snow much either, there had been a few times when Micah had coerced her into Skiing, but mostly she just enjoyed curling up by the fireplace with a good book. Either way, the mountains were a great place to train. Aela planned on running Jamie through the rigors of battle there, testing her endurance and how far she could go with her lightsaber and everything else.

She had done the same with her father nearly a decade ago.

"There's a plateau up in the mountains." She explained. "Drexl Nests surround it. It's the perfect place to train."

 

[Jamie Pyne]

Jamie's face went blank, staring into the blackness of Aela's pupils. "Perfect." The sarcasm practically dripped off her tongue.

Not only would she enjoy the benefits of a moon that was quite literally out to kill her, but she would enjoy that, and all of the inhospitality that Dxun had to offer while surrounded by frost, ice, and snow all at once!

"Any other misery I should prepare myself for before we get there? I just want to be fully in the know before I am forced to endure something like terentateks roaming around too."

Those were something she could do without ever seeing again as well. Some things in the galaxy really didn't need to exist. Jamie quite often found herself wondering why things like that existed in the first place.

"I'm getting the feeling this sort of training is not the norm within the Jedi Order as a whole?"

She couldn't imagine young students being brought to worlds where beasts were actively trying to end one's life at every corner as typical training.

[member="Aela Talith"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Jamie Pyne"]

"No terentateks." Aela said. "Just Drexl."

Which were basically flying terentateks, but Aela decided not to mention that. Jamie would be able to see for herself once they got to Dxun, for now she would keep her apprentice a little bit in the dark...probably better that way from her demeanor.

"Not particularly no." Aela admitted.

This particularly variety of training was more her own families rather than that of the New Jedi Order. Aela knew that it might have gotten some complaints from the other Masters, but it worked, it worked well. She and her siblings had been declared equals to most Masters by the time they had hit eighteen years of age, and mostly it had been because of their training under their family. The Talith children were naturally gifted of course, but that didn't mean much if you didn't train with those gifts.

"Jamie." Aela said seriously. "If I didn't think you could do this, I wouldn't bring you there."

It was the truth. Aela had seen something in Jamie, a certain strength. The Girl wouldn't like Dxun, hell she'd probably hate it, but in the end she would leave the planet not only a better Force User, but a better person. An understanding would be forged there, an understanding of herself, and the force.

 

[Jamie Pyne]

The younger woman nearly commented on how Aela believed Jamie would be fine on Bastion and look how that turned out, though she withheld the comment, more so because it had been her own fault she got so terribly hurt, though the point was still the same. As much of a lesson as Jamie learned back on Bastion, it didn't mean she was out of the woods when it came to other painfully learned lessons that could be on the horizon. Perhaps she would step the wrong way with a charging Drexyl, or maybe she would clumsily fall off a mountain, or perhaps she would simply trip over her own feet and tumble down a hill into some poisonous flora. With Jamie anything was possible!

"If you say so." She said finally.

A few awkward moments of silence passed between the two, before Jamie said anything more. "I hope you're right, for everyone's sake."

Aela had only observed a small sample of the disaster that was Jamie Pyne.

On Dxun she might very well unveil the whole package. A clumsy, well intentioned bubble headed girl from a distant world that had whimsical aspirations of making the galaxy a better place for everyone. If ever a naive thought existed, Jamie was the beholder of it.

[member="Aela Talith"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Jamie Pyne"]

Aela looked down at her padawan. It was clear that a part of herself still didn't quite believe in everything that she was capable of, but the truth was...Aela believed Jamie had the makings of a true hero, or at least a person that could do good. Perhaps that showed a bit of Aela's own naivete, but it was still a truth in its own way. She believed Jamie could do this because she saw a strength in her. The fact was that it took courage to do what she had done.

It took courage to leave her home, to find out about the force, to come to Bastion, even to attack Villia.

Sure she may not have gone the best route to all of those things, but she had done them, and she had tried her best throughout. That was the first step, and the reality was Jamie was still young. She would learn, she would get older and she would realize what was best. "Don't worry so much."

Aela said with a smile.

"Something is bound to go wrong." Not very encouraging. "But we'll overcome it, just like we did on Bastion."

There was a confidence to her words, a truth.

 

[Jamie Pyne]

"I'll....Try not to." She said, attempting to shake a bit of the hesitation from her words as she spoke. "Or at the very least try not to nearly get us killed again."

That was a memory she was eager to forget, though the lesson would hardly be forgotten.

"Do you think his two daughters will come looking for him, or us, in the future?"

Jamie couldn't quite gather just how far Villia or her sister might go to kill their father, now that he was out of the picture regardless of their attempt on his life. He was after all a loose end still, and both Aela and Jamie had crossed them. Villia at the very least had cause for seeking revenge, namely against Aela for breaking her ribs and injuring her so, but also for Jamie involving herself in the matter at all. They were a wealthy family, but how much influence they had outside of Bastion was a mystery to Jamie.

[member="Aela Talith"]

 

[Aela Talith]

[member="Jamie Pyne"]

The question was one that she herself had already considered. ”It’s possible.”

Aela admitted.

”Jorg said that he wasn’t the leader of...the cabal that was running things against the Alliance.” Aela wasn’t sure if Jamie would remember that particularly conversation after everything that she had already been through. ”We’ll know more once the SIS gets ahold of him, but from what he said this...thing is much bigger than Bastion.”

It would have to be to properly hurt the Alliance. Terrorism was never an easy thing to conduct, despite what many would believe. The Alliance was well protected by both the Military and the New Jedi Order, two huge bulwarks that anyone had to get over, if what Jorg said was true and there really was a giant conspiracy...then their reach would be far.

”If that’s true then in theory Villia and her sister will be able to reach quite far, since they’ll take their fathers position.” It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

Villia hadn’t exactly seemed stable, and Aela imagined that her sister likely wasn’t far from that. Of course there was always the chance that the two siblings would simply drop the entire thing, but from what Aela knew of them...that was unlikely.

 

[Jamie Pyne]

"Right...That's troubling." She said, laying her head back down atop the pillow. "Two crazies at the reigns of a vengeful house, buried in history of a sour world with less than noble intentions for the galaxy."

As if a slight draft suddenly welled in the room the younger blonde shivered, pulling up the blankets to her neck before turning away from Aela, signaling her intent to sleep the rest of the evening.

"This was exhausting." That was obvious, though she knew Aela was equally as tired, if not from saving Jamie than from all of the deliberating and planning that she had done whilst Jamie rested from her wounds.

It would still be a few days before they reached Sullust, and Jamie intended to be at the very least in better condition so that the very thought of walking wasn't tiring or painful. The injuries would take some time to heal, but with proper medical treatment she would be up sooner than later and ready for the trials that Dxun was sure to bring. Only now she would hopefully listen to the instructions of her mentor, rather than a snap reaction of poor judgement.

[member="Aela Talith"]