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In a misguided attempt to capture Onekel, a one Jedi Master Areliun decided the best way to do that would be to capture Ehlial and use him as bait.

Even if I’d been consulted prior, I would have declined to be a part of such a ridiculous thing. One does not use other people as bait, especially if one is a Jedi Master.

Honestly, some people…

Aside from “on Nar Shaddaa”, I’ve got no idea where my Padawan is, though I am (quietly) searching. He is still able to communicate with me, and I can’t sense any distress from him, which tells me that this Master Areliun isn’t dangerous, just possibly dangerously misguided and motivated by—well, I don’t know what. I am aware that Onekel had been a bounty hunter prior to being discovered as Force sensitive and choosing to go with the Sith, so I can only imagine the trail of bodies and crimes in his wake.

Whatever he’s done is either severe or personal if it prompted a Jedi Master to use such questionable methods.

Onekel and I met on Nar Shaddaa, as he claims to want to help. His idea of help seems to be, “trash the moon until the Jedi pokes his head out.”

That—is not going to work. All that’s going to do is make life miserable (or lethal) for the poor citizens unfortunate enough to be in the Sith’s wake while he’s having his little temper tantrum. Never mind that it wouldn’t likely draw the Jedi out, and would hurt Ehlial quite deeply if he learned that people suffered because of him. Onekel was insisting that he wanted to do what he wanted to do for “Ehlial’s sake”; I told him if that were the case, he would allow me to handle the situation as his methods would only harm Ehlial.

I could not seem to get that point across to him; evidently existing in a state of near perpetual frustration and anger makes one a bit hard of hearing.

Instead, in the end—admittedly, it was a bit underhanded, but Onekel had mentioned who his Master was, so I contacted his Master to let him know that his apprentice had a very strange fixation on ‘rescuing’ a Padawan who did not require actual rescuing. 

Oddly, I also found out that Ehlial is related to Darth Achai; interesting bit of trivia, but I doubt anything will come of it.

Regardless, Onekel’s Master must not have been pleased with this revelation and Onekel begrudgingly stepped back to allow me to go about extracting Ehlial using proper, non-violent, non-aggressive methods.

It was a bit of a gamble, I’m sure. Several times during our conversation, Onekel’s hands slid to his sabers and once he very nearly started to try and choke me. Self perservation (not to mention Cartel security and their ‘looks’) reminded him to keep his temper. 

It’s so easy to make them angry, I don’t even have to try. 

I just have to exist.

Oh, well, exist and not let them get their way all while remaining calm and non-violent.

I’m not certain if I find it disconcerting, depressing, or simply amusing that Onekel so quickly lashed out to take bait in an obvious trap.

Probably amusing.

It’s been awhile since I’ve spoken to Ehlial face to face.

I really ought to remedy that yet, at the same time, it’s good for him to get used to not always having his Master at his side for advice, for pulling him out of trouble—or even really for support.

At some point, he will need to learn to stand on his own, which will require me to keep a proper distance. Not so much that he would feel abandoned, but not so little that he would feel he could be careless as he’d know I’d be right there to swoop in and set things right.

For the time being, I’ve been present, yet not present.

He is traveling with two people who could be dreadful influences on a young Padawan, but he still holds himself with clarity and strength. To be entirely fair, one of the two is kept on an exceptionally short leash by me, but that is for everyone’s safety, considering man is a Force using supposed “ex-Sith” Pureblood who has no interest in becoming a Jedi.
The Council may have approved and may somewhat trust him and his story, but I do not; perhaps when Ehlial is a proper Knight, but even then, I would be wary.

I DO find myself hoping that when Ehlial is transitioned away from being a Padawan it is when he is ready and not due to his Master’s death. Given the current climate throughout the Galaxy, it may be more likely that it will be the latter.

Lately, I’ve been readjusting a few things in my life. Most of them are nothing substantial; rearranging the ship, cleaning out the cargo hold (Not to mention spending some time crafting crystals with a large box of small ones I’d apparently forgotten!) cleaning things I’ve been putting off cleaning, touching up some of my more faded tattoos. The ones around the eyes and at the tips of my lekku are always the worst. It’s good meditation practice, if nothing else.

I came to realize, at some point during all of that, that I’ve been in the same, largely unchanging routine for several decades now. That’s not necessarily a bad thing on the surface, but it came to me as I was working on a batch of crystals that I’ve inadvertently allowed a part of me to stagnate due to fear.

Not a silly thing such as fear of death or anything of that nature, it was something that I can now recall stemmed from my training as an Initiate and a Padawan. Destruction is a last resort, death of someone else is a last resort, indulging those too frequently would lead to a darker path if one was not exceptionally careful. That stuck with me, I thought, out of a desire to be helpful in a way that didn’t bring about manifestations of the Force that one might consider ‘harmful’ or destructive.

Perhaps, for a Padawan, that is a wise stance to take. Err on the side of caution and all of that, but I am no longer a Padawan. I haven’t been a Padawan for almost a quarter of a century. At some point being too cautious can be as detremental as being too headstrong and reckless, after all.

All that aside, I went back to Tython and began studying again; the looks I got from some of the Initiates—I don’t think they quite understood what I was doing or why, but did not want to bother a Master to ask. That is a pity, really, curiousity isn’t always a bad thing. Well, that, and nobody wants to be the vaguely unsettling old man in the library.

I studied the things I’d only glossed over as a student. It was easier now to put them into practice, of course, and I didn’t find myself nearly as apprehensive about their use in practice as I’d been about it in my mind.

Still, I find myself unsure as to whether it’s a wise move to shift focus from mending and repairing to—no, no, that’s simply ridiculous. I’m still fully capable of mending wounds, this is just an expansion of the skills I already possessed in terms of Force use.

That will all pass as I keep working at it and become more comfortable with some of the more destructive uses of the Force, I suppose.

I could blame that awful little Sith and the conversations we had while I held him up in the air until he calmed himself down enough to at least act like a rational person again. It might actually feel good to blame him, though that encounter was my fault; I really must not bait them so much.

Admittedly, I’ve been avoiding Ehlial for a bit. Thankfully,  he’s been busy, but the last thing that poor kid needs is to see his Master in a—I’m not even sure what it is. State of transition? No, no, that sounds ridiculous, nothing is transitioning, I am simply dealing with a long standing, silly little fear that’d I’d either buried or forgotten.  At my age and, at my rank, it’s just a bit ridiculous to still be so afraid of the dark, in a manner of speaking.

These are the sorts of times when I do wish my Master had not died during the Sacking of Coruscant.

And it’s thoughts like that that tell me I need to go and still my mind through meditation.

Or, I suppose, if I were more like what seems to be passing for Padawans these days, it would be a prompt to go to Nar Shaddaa, get blitzed out of my mind, and end up either dancing naked somewhere or wake up on the ship of someone I don’t know or remember.

Meditation it is.

That Bi’ev fellow from the open frequency finally decided he wanted to ‘come and see me’. Of course, he meant he wanted to, very likely, kill me.

I’m confident enough in my own skills to not fear him (and, really, if I die, it’s the will of the Force that I rejoin it), but I do have to admit that he’s a bit tougher than I’d figured. Fortunately, what he can damage, I can repair, and we appear to have fairly similar thresholds of tolerance.

He attacked me, as I expected he would, and I simply endured (and may have hit him in the face with a rock or two, purely by accident, of course) until I’d had enough of him. I suspect he was looking for a reaction other than calm out of me, and the more I refused to grant it, the more insistent he became.

He escaped my lifting of him several times, and all it seemed to do was irritate him, but eventually, I think he realized that I was not about to put him down until he could pretend to be a rational person again. During the time he spat insults and occasional lighting at me, I realized that it seems to take older Sith a very long time to settle down once they’re all worked up.

We actually had quite a nice chat about philosophy, the various codes and interpretations, and apprentices—or, in my case, my Padawan, while he was up there. I did eventually have to let him down; gets tiring to suspend someone like that and still deflect an attack now and then and I had no way to transport him safely or call for a transport.

The Sith isn’t stupid, he’d seen to that as part of the terms. I—hate to admit it, but I was surprised when he followed his own terms as well and didn’t appear to have any active communication channels available.

And, of course, he used his new found freedom to knock me down and incapacitate me. He could have killed me, but he walked away instead. Guess he just wanted the last ‘word’ in the fight.
I’d forgotten how unpleasant Force lighting is. I may take a few days off to recover. 

Elihu managed to get himself right back into trouble after deciding he wanted to leave Tython and my, of course, allowing him to do so.

Lost his lightsaber, or so he says; I suspect he sold it for spice, but that’s beside the point.

I travelled to Nar Shaddaa to assist him in either finding it or getting a new one, and he insisted that I give him mine. Clearly, that was not a viable option. Elihu moved from confidence, to appearing as a frightened child, and when none of that really worked, he tried to rob me.

It’s rare that I ever am all that aware of my lekku, they simply exist, I’ve had them for the vast majority of my life, but they’re also a bit of a ‘weak’ point when it comes to combat; they’re quite easy to injure. Elihu knows this, of course, and when he tried to rob me, he started with an attempt to momentarily stun me by digging his fingers into my lekku and both squeezing and pulling as hard as he could. 

That was quite painful, there is no denying that, however, I’m well conditioned to have very little outward response to pain, if at all possible.  We ended up in a proper fight, though I didn’t use my lightsaber at all; Elihu is a child, and he was unarmed, save for the Force.

Which he was using.

I think I still have debris in one of my ears. 

Ended up knocking him over and holding him in place using the Force until he’d calmed to the point that he wasn’t in a blind rage. I can’t say it was even a proper fight; Elihu is skilled, of course, he’s had some measure of training, but I have several decades of it on him and only let him drag it out so he could expend some of his energy.

After I’d mended the minor bruises and cuts that both he and I had received, he agreed to let me help him look for his lightsabaer. That was, as I suspected, an excuse to go to the Slippery Slopes for him. On the way, I suggested that, perhaps, I could work with him in the construction of a new lightsaber. I’m well versed on the topic, and Elihu has some interest in it (mainly in the crystals) as well.

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Ehlial seems to be fully recovered; I shouldn’t keep him here any longer.

It’s just as well, he needs to get back to training.

I wish I could say that I wasn’t looking forward to letting him go, but I am. Once he’s off the ship, I plan to sleep.

When I wake up, I plan to sleep some more.

To say that I’m completely wiped out, mentally and physically, after the events of the past month or so would be an understatement, but I will not trouble my Padawan with it. He already has a slight habit of feeling guilty for things that aren’t his fault, and I have no desire to encourage that trait.

If Jude decides to pay the ship a visit, I do hope he lets me be, but I somehow doubt that he will.

I spoke to Jude at length last night.

For several hours, to be exact. 

He has an excellent ability to make one’s basic, emotion based reaction be to swat him upside the head somehow. I’m not yet certain if he does it on purpose or if it’s simply the way that he is.

I lean toward ‘on purpose’, however.

Jude faces many problems due to a string of bad decisions that he’s made; they include having several bounties on him, evidently, but that’s to be expected. He mentioned that his family wants nothing to do with him mainly based on that.

He’s also been left with the feeling—I imagine given to him by certain others who claim to be ‘Jedi’—that he is no longer welcome with the Order. That, I could not let stand. I cannot control what other say or think, obviously, but holding grudges to that degree would be unhealthy and certainly against all of our teachings.

Throughout our conversation, I made it quite clear that I was certain he’d be welcomed back if he wished to return; he told me he didn’t believe anyone would take him.

Obviously, I have a Padawan, and could not offer myself, but even then,  Jude’s response was that I’d just “get sick of him within a week or two” and cast him off as someone else’s problem rather than do their job and try to guide him through whatever was giving him so many problems.

That is the mindset his former Masters left with him, that he was a ‘problem’ as opposed to a student, and that is not at all acceptable.

Hopefully, he can be guided back to a better path than the one he’s on now. It would be a shame to see that sort of skill go to waste.

For the time being, I’ve invited him to stay on my ship. He’s been, if he is to be believed, sleeping out in the streets on Nar Shaddaa, of all places.

Ehlial, I think, ran into his first real stumbling point in his training.

He came face to face with a Sith Lord who, thankfully, could not get at him directly, but who managed to shake the poor kid to his core.

Told my Padawan things along the lines of being able to see the “darkness within him”, that he’d been “touched by darkness”, and other such nonsense.

Ehlial was in quite a state when I got to him. I already knew that something was wrong—that something had frightened him terribly, and I was admittedly proud when I saw how well he was managing to keep himself under control, even if it was just barely.

The Sith, of course, had been lying; I know my own Padawan, and he doesn’t even possess shadows, let alone actual ‘darkness’. Another Jedi happened to overhear and confirmed what I already knew and what I’m sure Ehlial knows as well.

Even so, he was quite shaken; the first time confronting a Sith, especially one markedly more powerful, is difficult. I asked him if he’d feel more comfortable staying on my ship for a day or two and, quite frankly, even if he had refused, I’d have simply turned it into an order. He went back ahead of me, and was asleep in the ship’s medbay when I returned.

Depending on how he seems later in the evening, I may take him back to Tython for a few days to give him proper time to recover.

I don’t know quite where to begin.

I can’t say that I know Jude; I don’t. I met him once, while escorting a friend of his—Sanderson, I think—back to his ship after Sanderson kept threatening to start throwing bombs in a cantina. Needless to say, the man was just slightly full of spice and wasn’t fit to be out in public, even by Nar Shaddaa standards.

Jude seemed convinced that I was trying to harm his friend and followed us. Briefly, he ranted to me about how he was leaving the Jedi Order and the Republic to become Sith. I don’t know if he was looking for me to get upset, or attack him, or what. All I did was stand there and let him yell and, in the end, told him I was sorry that he felt the Order had failed him. Eventually, he tired of ranting at me and left with his friend.

I thought nothing of it until recently, when a Sith apprentice made it known that Jude, for some reason, wished to meet my Padawan. The group of us met on Alderaan, away from any civilians. I am not stupid, and was not about to allow Ehlial to meet a Sith (apprentice or otherwise) alone, especially since it could have been a trap.  

Evidently, one of Jude’s new keepers felt the same as, not long after his arrival, a Sith Lord appeared.

It seemed that my presence caused the Sith Lord’s restraint. I can’t, in good faith, say that his presence had the same effect on me, as I never once had the urge to make a hostile move. While, on some level, I do pity Jude, he made his choice and it is not my place to attempt and force him back. I do suspect that the Sith, whether he would admit it or not, was able to sense that I had no hidden (or blatant, for that matter) hostile intentions.

The conversation that was had was, by and large, mundane. Jude and Ehlial chatted for a bit—they’re near the same age—they dueled once, a friendly sort of duel, of course, considering both myself and a Sith Lord were present. There was a Rattataki named Onekal as well, but, I suspect we bored him half to sleep, and he did not say much. A few times, Jude tried to throw my Padawan off balance, usually with an off-color comment, but Ehlial handled it with clarity and grace. He picks up on things so quickly.

Before Jude left with the other Sith, I made certain to tell him, in very clear terms, that the way he was treated by the Order and by his former Masters was not only terribly wrong, but was not at all indicitive of the Order as a whole. I did express regret that he was made to feel as if he were a ‘lost cause’ and that nobody stepped in to help him—and that he was always welcome to return. Obviously, I did not expect him to take that offer.

He told me that it meant a lot to him to hear a Jedi Master acknowledge what had happened and admit that it wasn’t right.

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