strangetrip | [GP] Shoot that poison arrow

[GP] Shoot that poison arrow

None of the guests noticed when the spiky-haired man-child in jeans and purple t-shirt, wrists wrapped in cheap leather and metal bracelets, arrived at the Madonna Inn a few hours before midnight on February 13. That, in itself, wasn't all that surprising. Eros, otherwise known as Danny Valentine, had millennia of experience doing his job without being spotted.

What was surprising was that the dude at the front desk did see him. Tall and Nondescript waved him over and then gave him a room number 'in case you wanted to rest'. But Danny didn't.

Want to, or rest. He spent the time before the clock struck midnight polishing his love gun. Not like that. He'd find a girl to spend his nameday with. He always did. No, this little beauty was made by Hephaestus himself. It shot love darts that disappeared on contact.

At midnight, kitted out with more love darts than there were people in this pink and gold monstrosity, Danny left his room and shot the first person he saw--and didn't wait to see what would happen.

No point getting a slow start. He had a lot of work to do.

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It's difficult for Rey to stifle her excitement at learning this; she had been looking for a Jedi, actually, before she ended up here.

"Do you know Luke?" she asks, excitedly. "Luke Skywalker?"

"I do know two Skywalkers, but no Luke. Shmi, and her son Anakin." Perhaps the young woman's Luke was a relative? Most families were bigger than two people, it would make sense. Though if this Luke was a Jedi... hmm. Definitely odd, as he was prepared to swear that there was no Jedi named Luke Skywalker at all. And yet, hadn't he been told that people could come to this place from different times?

Anakin? Was that maybe a son of Luke's? Neither Han nor General Organa mentioned Luke having a son or having a partner, but Luke had been gone for a very long time.

"I don't know an Anakin," she says, shaking her head. "Just a Luke, and his sister Leia."

A beat, and then:

"Where were you hiding before now?" she asks. "We all thought Luke was the only Jedi left."

...Ah. Even a Jedi Master who concerned himself with the future even less than Qui-Gon, who was notorious for paying little attention to it, would have felt those words like a solid punch to the gut. Different times, indeed, and what had gone wrong? Wrong enough to kill the whole Order (younglings included? surely not, surely they'd simply been returned to their families and allowed to forget) because that was the only reason to think there was only one Jedi left. There was no calamity that Master Qui-Gon Jinn could conceive of that would leave Jedi alive and unwilling to act openly.

A terrible future, and likely he'd missed it twice - once being caught in it in the first place, and again on being brought to the Inn. In that light, it was an absolute duty to mind the present. This present. "I believe I'm from some distance in your past, then. The Jedi Order is a substantial group, last I knew."

"A substantial group?" Rey echoes, incredulous. She almost can't believe it.

"What time are you from?" she asks. And perhaps, a more important question: "What's your name?"

"I believe we can safely say 'long before you were born'." An exact year was likely not necessary, beyond that fact. If she hadn't even heard of a time when a whole Jedi Order had defended the galaxy, she was either from far enough in the future that his now would make no sense, or far enough in the part that hers would mean nothing to him. "My name is Qui-Gon Jinn. And you are?"

"Rey." She looks down at her hand, wondering if she should offer it to him. She extends her hand to him, the movement wooden.

Shaking hands was what people did when they were meeting for the first time, right?

Regardless of if he takes her hand or not, she still continues. "I was on my way to see Luke when I arrived here," she says. "He had been training Jedi, trying to rebuild the Jedi Order. The Sith attacked and destroyed everything," she said, her thought trailing off to the vision from before. "He went into hiding."

A beat. Rey presses her lips together briefly, and clearly hesitates.

"I was hoping he would train me."

Luke Skywalker, she'd said. A descendant of Anakin, most likely, though that only added more questions for which Rey, no doubt, had no more answers than he did. Anakin had been the Chosen One, he was as sure of it now as he'd ever been. Chosen to bring balance to the Force.

Could 'balance to the Force' have meant bringing the Sith back into power? They'd been 'extinct' for so long, and the Light Side of the Force had ruled... could 'balance' mean darkness and light coexisting? It was an uncomfortably reasonable possibility, even if the 'coexisting' part had clearly not happened. "I was about to take on a new apprentice myself, before arriving here. Anakin Skywalker, the one I mentioned earlier, in fact. Perhaps an ancestor of your Luke."

This man had trained an ancestor of Luke? Rey wished she had been able to find Luke to start her training, but barring that, she could think of no better teacher to have than someone who trained a Skywalker before them.

Rey sits down beside him, wondering what kind of man Anakin could have been, and what kind of Jedi Order might have existed during Qui-Gon's time. She had heard rumors of them, but everything had been so vague; so much of the Jedi lore had been eradicated by the Empire and later the First Order that there wasn't really anything for Rey to imagine.

"What was it like?" she asks suddenly. "The Jedi Order, I mean."

"Ah, I'm afraid that may be a little like asking a fish about the water." He didn't remember anything but the Jedi Order, which was likely the point of only accepting infants and toddlers for the training. If you didn't know anything else, it was harder to rebel, in theory.

There were, in his opinion, several flaws in that theory, but never mind. "Like most Jedi, I was taken in by the order before I can remember. I grew up in the Temple with other young trainees, learning the ways of the Force. When I was old enough, a master took me as his apprentice, until the Council judged me ready for my trials." It was possible that Dooku had had to twist arms as gently and steadily for him as he'd had for Anakin... a suspicion only, as he could not be sure. "In time, I took on my own apprentice. It might be easier if you tell me what you know or what you've heard."

"I don't really know anything," Rey admits, feeling embarrassed. There was a lot she didn't know, she realized now. And most of what she did know was legend, really -- just stories she heard from spacers and smugglers at Niima Outpost. "All the Jedi were wiped out before I was born. No one's really certain what happened... most people think the Empire killed them all."

A beat.

"Well, most of them," she corrects herself. "Luke was trained by two Jedi who survived all of that, so there may have been more that survived. One of them was..."

Rey pauses, thinking. He had a weird name, one she'd never heard before.

"Yoda," she remembers. "And the other one was named Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan Kenobi."

Rey remembered that name easily. She liked it. It sounded heroic, just like Dosmit Ræh.

"Ah." A solid line between them at last, and confirmation that she was indeed from the future relative to him. Yoda had survived whatever disaster had fallen on the order, as had Obi-Wan, and both had trained her Luke. "I know both Yoda and Obi-Wan well. Yoda was my master's master and assisted in my own training. Obi-Wan was my own apprentice, and about to become a full Jedi Knight before I came here." He had no doubt whatsoever that the Council would have acceded to his demand to allow Obi-Wan to complete his Trials and Anakin to become his Padawan learner.

"You knew both of them?"

The expression on Rey's face is one of true and utter awe. She had heard stories of Luke Skywalker even while on Jakku, and even more after she joined the Resistance. She was never certain what parts of the stories were true, but General Leia had confirmed some of it before she left in search for Luke.

It's difficult not to feel completely overwhelmed by the reality of it all. Never in her wildest dreams did she ever imagine she'd get to meet a Jedi, let alone one that had been around during the days of the Old Republic.

"How old did someone have to be for you to take them as an apprentice?"

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[GP] Shoot that poison arrow

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA

Re: Qui-Gon Jinn - safe space - OTA