Tera’s thoughts are racing, bounding about and crashing against the ragged edges of your own mind. You hear the constant tapping, like violent raindrops against the windows during a thunderous storm, her excitement too much for her to contain. Yet, even with the proximity of the noiseless sound, you cannot make out the words properly.

  This chaotic mess of mind against mind pains you — a drum, constantly beating against your brain, discordant against the echo of dozens of others further off. How could you possibly subject your friend to even the smallest sliver of this torture?

  You’ve spent your whole life bearing this kind of pain. Your witchsight — an empathetic sense you can never turn off, gives off a constant drone in your mind. Thoughts and emotions thrum through your body at all times of day, and it’s only gotten worse ever since you’ve been given the “gift” of telepathy.

  What could go wrong? What could possibly be the issue with trying to send her your thoughts? Well, there’s plenty of horrendous things you can think of.

  Could she even stand up to the thoughts of another rebounding throughout her mind? Would it do irreparable damage? And, what if you mess up? Maybe you’ll accidentally rip her personality in half. Maybe you’ll blow up her brain! You have no idea what you’re doing. Even if Master Yoda did tell you to “practice,” doing experimentation upon your friend is possibly the most dangerous thing you can think of!

  And so, your answer to Tera is “No. This could go really badly.”

  And, of course, her response is “Aww, but I trust you! Think of how amazing it would be!”

  “The last time I had a ‘good idea,’ I lost two eyes and burned two arms. So, I don’t think I can call it amazing. I’d rather not try something without supervision, or without trying on something I don’t care about.”

  She spins in her chair, pouting at the disappointment, by the feel of her emotions. You do feel a bit bad about crushing her dreams here, but you’d rather not make another big mistake. Last time, only you physically suffered. Master Masbau paid for your mistake in a different way. Trying something like telepathy, on another Youngling, when you’re already on thin ice with the Council seems like the fastest way to getting kicked out. No, you’ll not risk it. You won’t risk hurting your friend.

  “Sorry, Tera. I just don’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe it would work, but using you as a test subject just sounds like a bad idea.”

  She sighs and stops with her spinning, then leans forward to hold onto your encased arm. “I understand. I’ve been thinking that if you could get it to work, then I would be able to talk with you at any time. You’re all alone most of the time, here. I just want to make sure you’re not bored or lonely.”

  “Oh… Well, thanks. I guess you’re right, but I’ll be out of here soon, I think. I can suck it up for a bit longer. It’s just not worth the risk.” you say, giving her the best smile you can muster.

  “Alright. I’ll hold you to that. You’d better be out of here before the Trials, though!”

  “I won’t be able to participate, though.”

  “You can at least spectate mine!”

  “Can I? I thought they were kind of secretive.”

  “Oh, right. You can cheer me on in that case.”

  “I can do that from here.”

  “Just get out of here as soon as you can!” she cries, lightly slapping you on the arm.

  “Ha! Yeah, yeah. I will. When are the Trials again? I’ve lost of track of time.”

  “Two months. Roughly.”

  “Alright. I’ll be better by then!”

  With that, she leans over and gives you a quick hug. The two of you spend a few more minutes speaking about nothing important before it’s time for her to depart. She’s got her lessons, and you’ve got your own. Force Purification isn’t going to learn itself into your mind!

  Huh, that’s a thought. Could you possibly just learn a technique using your telepathy? That would be stellar! But, this isn’t the time to be thinking of that, so you shut that thought away for another day.

  ≡][≡ ??? ≡][≡

  “Which way, Initiate Xena?”

  “Turn left here. We’re almost there.”

  The droid pushes you forward on your borrowed power chair, turning where you direct it to. After another couple weeks of recovery, you’re finally able to go for extended periods of time without having to keep your arms soaked in bacta, and are now allowed to leave the Halls of Healing in between lessons.

  The lessons themselves have been going quite well, surprisingly. You’re really starting to get a grasp on the details of Force Purification, though you’re still unable to perform it yourself. Master Corr continues to give you demonstrations of the technique and has even brought you out on short “field trips” to demonstrate the technique on other people who have need of it. You’ve watched her perform it on both Jedi and Coruscanti citizens, curing infections and purging diseases as easily as she breathes. Master Corr, however, tells you that it takes much concentration and experience to use the technique on others — far more than on oneself. Her explanation boiled down to it being more difficult to influence the Force within others than that within yourself.

  Your trips were rather interesting in other aspects. You’ve been so used to walking around the halls of the Temple, only seeing those who know of you or know better than to judge an odd looking Youngling. It hadn’t occurred to you that those outside the Jedi Order, such as the civilians being cared for within the Halls of Healing, would be far less predisposed toward keeping their mouths shut at your appearance. Even with your eye-sockets wrapped in tape and arms concealed behind an Initiate’s robes, you’ve still gotten many comments about your other features, specifically your tail.

  How many other species out in the wider Galaxy have a tail like yours? Not many, apparently. You can’t even name any at all! The horns aren’t too strange, and your third eye is covered by your headband as usual, so thankfully nobody pays much attention to those. It’s not that the comments have been unkind, but the fact that they’re even made about your oddities — like common gossip! — that makes you remember the warnings you’ve heard about intolerance outside the Order.

  Out there, not everyone follows the ways of the Jedi. Not everyone can understand the significance or understand the rights of other sentients so unlike themselves. Humans, for some reason or another, make up the majority of the population on Coruscant, and you’ve heard of human-centric factions popping up — extremists and supremacists — extremely concerning to the massively diverse public and to the Jedi Order too. Fortunately, none of the patients you visited were of this kind. Even as isolated as you’ve been within your enclave, you know how much others like you have suffered. The persecution of your kind and your status as the Imperium’s bogeymen have endured for millenia. Change will be hard. Change may not ever happen.

  Wait, what was that? Did it — a string of unsourced thought — sneak into your mind again? You shake your head out of your stupor and rub your star-filled sockets with your gloved hands. The medical tape crinkles at the touch and you resist the urge to flutter open your eyes. Last time you did that, the tape had grown rather hot and Master Corr had started panicking, thinking the tape was about to burst into flames. You’d gotten away with only slightly singed wrappings, browned and blackened from the heat emanating from your eye-sockets.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  You pull your hands away from your face and lace your fingers together in your lap. The artificial felt of the gloves feels restrictive, preventing you from performing such a simple action with ease. The gloves catch on each other, tugging and pulling the ends up from your wrists. With a hiss of annoyance, you unlace your hands and adjust them both until they’re back in place. Hopefully, Master Corr can find you better gloves soon. You’d requested them in order to conceal your abnormal hands. The rest of your arms are nicely hidden by your sleeves.

  “Up those stairs, droid.” you say. Even with your eye hidden from the world behind the headband, you’re still able to find your way. You watch, warp-eye open, as other Initiates, Padawans, Knights, Masters, and Temple staff hurry past. Their true-selves are open to you, each one telling a beautiful story, but you ignore it all. Instead, you focus on a few specific psyches you recognize — the Temple Guards in the security office. Only a little ways to go.

  The nice thing about the power chair is that it allows you to hover up the multiple flights of stairs. The droid pushes you along, its own repulsors humming quietly. Honestly, you could’ve walked your way over, but Master Corr insisted you use the chair for at least a few more days, partly to ensure you don’t exhaust yourself, and partly so she can play around with it when you’re not using it. Well, you’re not exactly sure about the latter thing, but you wouldn’t put it past her to do so.

  Master Lasah’s lessons on Force Sight have also been progressing nicely. While you’re relying primarily on your warp-eye and witchsight to navigate right now, you’re sure you’ll soon be able to do so with only your sense of the Force.

  Each time Master Lasah visits, you get just a tiny bit better. She gives you short lectures on Force Sight, expanding on the minutiae of the technique. Between lessons, you do your best to practice it, for this is the one thing you’re sure can’t hurt you even if you mess up. Unlike your telepathy, with which you are still unable to properly hear another person’s thoughts, there’s no danger with practicing Force Sight, so you feel confident in your ability to practice in peace.

  After all the practice you’ve done, you’re now able to regularly feel the contours of shapes within a short range with concentration. It’s almost as if the blanket that represented the Force to you, is now your tool for feeling out external objects. You can throw it in a direction and the contours of the object become revealed to your “sight!” However, it’s limited. You’ve only got a short range, can’t feel much detail, and can only sense a few objects at a time, but you’re getting there. Master Lasah’s been happy enough with your progress that she’s now willing to teach you Battle Meditation. Unfortunately, she still only has the same amount of time with you each day. You’ll have to split the lessons between Force Sight and Battle Meditation if you want to learn both. At this point, you might be able to learn Force Sight yourself with enough practice by yourself, but progress will be much faster with Master Lasah’s oversight. The same cannot be said for Battle Meditation of course, as you have no experience with it whatsoever.

  As you move, you’re bombarded with the thoughts of many different minds. It’s all just a garbled mess with so many people around. You catch only flashes of people’s ideas and intentions, chopped up bits of words turned into a gibberish stew, and mentally reflected emotions. Overall, you’re able to learn more simply by looking around with your witchsight than listening with your telepathy. What’s most annoying is when you catch a hint of a recognizable word or phrase, jolting you out of your thoughts and interrupting what you were doing. Fortunately, your name isn’t common at all, even in the mush of jumbled up syllables surrounding your mind. If it were, you’re sure you’d be whipping your head around left and right, looking for who could possibly be thinking of you.

  The most interesting, but also most disturbing thing is thoughts of nonhumans. They don’t think like you. They’re aliens. Xenos. Why would they?

  Even if they’re Jedi, even if they’ve been raised in the same environment as you, their brains and thought processes are fundamentally different. When their thoughts butt up against yours, you feel a sense of… alienation, if you could call it that.

  Strangely enough, you didn’t feel this so much with Master Corr, but maybe that’s because her mind was one of the first you’d felt when you’d woken up. She’s familiar — a friend. Masters Lasah and Yoda and even your friends, however, did trigger the feeling. It had been slight, something you’d not acknowledged given the tiny sample size, but now, out here with so many others, you’re starting to get a feel for the differences.

  But, what’s also strange is the realization it’s only the thoughts of nonhumans that triggers that odd feeling. Why are humans not doing so? Aren’t you also nonhuman? The ridiculous thought has passed through your mind before — that you’re just some sort of genetic experiment — but this new phenomenon has made it even more probable that you’re based off of humanity. This question again…

  What are you?

  “Ah, we’re here.” The droid stops pushing your chair at your words. Technically, you could have just controlled the chair yourself with the hand controls or with the Force, but something about making the droid do the work felt right. However, now that you’re already here, you assume control using the interface below your hand.

  The visitor’s chime goes off as you approach and you slow to a stop in front of the security office door. You wait a few minutes, but nobody answers. Looking around with your warp-eye, you see the true-selves you were tracking lying still within the rooms beyond the door. A few other glowing blobs of emotions wander about, but most everyone is lying about. Are they just sleeping? They probably didn’t hear your approach.

  Bracing yourself, you lean forward and knock on the door. Even with your mental preparation, you cringe at the stiff shock in your hand and cradle your stinging knuckles with your other. Maybe you should have had the droid do the knocking…

  Still, the mild pain is worth it. A couple of the people within clearly heard your knocking and now head your way. One of them stops by where you know the camera console to be, checking for who is at the door. The other one prepares to let you in, and does so at a signal from the one at the cameras.

  You look up blindly at the man before you and smile at him, then give as best a bow you can from the seat of your power chair.

  “Hello, Master Drallig. Do you have a few minutes?”

  He stares at you for a moment, mixed emotions and concepts of sadness, duty, and understanding flitting about across the facade above his true-self. You watch as the outline of his true-self nods, tracking along with his physical body.

  “Good afternoon, Xena. It’s been a while.”

  Cin Drallig is one of the most well respected Masters of the Order; an excellent swordsman to the point of being appointed the Temple’s battlemaster. He’s taught dozens, if not hundreds of Jedi in the lightsaber arts. Currently, he also serves as a core member of the Temple’s security force.

  Master Masbau always spoke highly of him. Even when your friends would call him by that unflattering nickname that seems to have been passed down through generations of his students, you’ve tried to not let that stick in your head when you’ve spoken with him.

  Master Drallig leads you into the security offices and parks you in a small common area. A kitchen takes up one side of the room, from which Master Drallig grabs a kettle and two cups. You listen to the splash of a liquid as he pours you a cup, then thank him as he hands it to you.

  You sit and sip at the drink — a warm and bitter tea, as you discover — while he scrolls through a datapad. You hear the light tapping of his finger as he flicks through it for a few minutes, then finds what he’s looking for and settles in to read.

  The tea is… agreeable. Barely. It’s a bit too bitter for you and you’re not really sure what it reminds you of, but you keep sipping at it since you’re not sure what else to do. It’s only when you realize you’ve drained the cup that you have to fight the urge to fidget. To distract yourself, you focus on the murky stream of Master Drallig’s thoughts, and do your best to listen in.

  However, you unfortunately get nothing. While it’s slightly quieter here in the security offices, in the mental-sense that is, there’s still enough people to make it difficult to make out which one is Master Drallig. You don’t know him well enough to have a hope of immediately identifying which one is him, so you have to resort to picking through each tangled string of thoughts before you can find him. And even once you do find him, you get nothing. His mind is far away, stoic and quiet like him. You can’t parse his thoughts at all, no matter how hard you try. It’s a complex puzzle, an impenetrable box, yet at the same time his mind leaks like anyone else’s, but his thoughts flow past yours and you cannot hope to catch even a whisper of sense.

  You give up after a few minutes. There’s no hope of success right now, and you should probably be ready for when he finally—

  An audible click notifies you that he’s finished. He shuts off the datapad then leans forward in his seat and tells you exactly what you want to hear.

  “This will do. I have to say, this design is a bit… strange, but I have no legitimate objections to this, and there’s nothing in the ordinances saying that you can’t do this.”

  “Great! Thank you, Master!”

  “If that’s all, then you may leave. Have a good day, Youngling.”

  “You too.”

  You happily hum to yourself as you make your way back to the medical ward. It was a rather long trip for such a short meeting, but you accomplished what you wanted and you got some fresh air. Next time you go out like this, maybe you’ll even be allowed to walk unaided!

  But finally, you’ve gotten permission to make your mask. While Master Masbau had gone and gotten a preliminary agreement with Master Drallig for you, you’d received a note the other day from Master Drallig telling you to send him your design for a review once ready. After all, while Master Masbau (mostly) trusts you to not make unwise design choices, the “Troll” still needs to see who, or what, is crossing his bridge.