Age: Still 10

/\/\/\

The glowing centre of the Republic, the beating heart of half a galaxy. Even from space, Coruscant was a mass of lighting; housing, shops, air traffic routes, space traffic routes and, of course, the government buildings.

It was a shame, then, that Revan seemed to be the only person who was paying it the slightest bit of attention. Ania was staring distractedly out of the ship's viewport at nearby systems, little more than exceptionally bright stars and paler planets from this distance. And Malak was rubbing his head, looking equally distracted.

Well, Ania was easy enough to work out - her home system of Metellos was very close to Coruscant, and she was probably looking for it. Revan waited a couple of seconds to see if Ania snapped out of it, then turned to Malak. "Are you all right?"

"Headache," he muttered. "It keeps getting worse."

"It'll pass," Revan said. "Just a headache, right?"

> "Yeah. Bad one, though."

/\/\/\

It was a dull, steady ache, and contrary to Revan's promises, it only got worse over the next ten minutes. By the time they began their descent to the planet's surface, Malak's peripheral vision was beginning to close in; when the ship finally touched down he was not only completely blind but also contending with a nasty buzzing in his ears.

Revan and Ania put him between them as they left the ship and headed for the Council room; they at least made sure that he did not walk into anything as he tried desperately to use the Force for direction. It seemed an impossible task; the rushing in his ears only seemed to be increasing, and he was further distracted by the need to keep moving.

He didn't take in a single word said during their brief meeting with the High Council, still trying to focus. It should have been easier now that he was standing still, but he found that the harder he tried to focus, the more his headache intensified.

He didn't notice that the meeting was over until Revan elbowed him hard in the side on her way out of the room. He realised then that someone had been calling his name for several minutes now.

"Sorry, Master," he muttered.

"It's a wonderful view," the man said. His voice was low and calm, a blessed relief after the grating voice of whoever led the Council. Malak felt some of his doubts lift; he had been having severe apprehensions about living with a Master who'd had an apprentice forced upon him. Perhaps this wouldn't be so bad after all... if this was Zhar, he sounded nice enough.

"But I don't believe that the view from that window was what distracted you," Zhar continued, his tone becoming more curious. "Is something the matter, apprentice?"

"I've got a headache, Master," Malak admitted. "And I can't see."

/\/\/\

"This," Kavar said, opening a small container on the lab station, "is black powder."

He lowered the box to Ania's level - a distance of about two feet - and she peered in. "Wow. It's, uh, black."

"It's one of the cruder forms of explosives," he said, smiling a little. "Makes a great racket, too, so we should go outside to test it in large quantities. However..."

He took a tiny pinch of it from the box and put it on the desk; a desk, Ania noticed, which already had several black marks on it. "Go on, try and make it go up."

There was meant to be a third trial, wasn't there? She couldn't be a Padawan without a third trial, everyone knew that. And this was far too simple to be a trial...

"Don't get any closer," Kavar warned when she was still three metres away. "It'll have your eyebrows off."

Ania stopped. "But I need to touch it to -"

"You blew up that energy cell without touching it," he pointed out.

"Yeah, but that was an accident."

"Some of the greatest Force abilities are discovered by accident, apprentice. Have a try."

She also didn't know how the black powder was meant to work, Ania realised a second later, and surely she needed at least some hint so that she knew what kind of force to apply. She didn't ask, however, as Kavar didn't look ready to answer any more protestations, and she didn't want to push her boundaries too far this early on. She turned her attention to the tiny pile of black powder on the desk.

Okay. She was meant to work this out herself, then. So how had she blown up the energy cell?

Ania frowned at the black powder for what seemed like far too long, trying to recall how she'd felt when blowing up those cells. It felt like ages ago, and anyway it was usually a loss of control that triggered it...

...yes, that sensation of everything slipping out of her grasp, suddenly being overwhelmed by power, and something had to give...

...so what she did, hah, what she did was to send the extra power somewhere else...

...like that.

There was a pop, a plume of smoke and a few sparks arose from the pile of powder, and there was suddenly one more black mark on the desk.

"Congratulations, Padawan," Kavar said. "You passed."

/\/\/\

"You say you can't see?"

"No, Master," Malak said. He was feeling rather put out; this wasn't exactly how he had hoped his first visit to the infirmary would go. For one thing, he hadn't been expecting to be the patient.

He was met with a warm chuckle. "I'm no Master. Call me Tyree. You say it came on as you were coming in to land?"

"Yes, M- Tyree."

"And basic meditative techniques had no effect?"

"They made it worse."

"Hm. Can you feel it when I do this?"

Nothing touched him; nothing moved in the Force, insofar as he could tell when everything was spinning and crowding in like this. "No, I can't."

"Oh, dear," Tyree said, and patted Malak gently on the shoulder. "I think you are going to have to see a Master, after all."

/\/\/\

"Do you follow current events, Revan?" Kreia asked as Revan followed her down a maze of corridors. Revan shrugged.

"Not really."

"A pity." They emerged suddenly into daylight, one of the many street levels of Coruscant. "More so as we are going to the Senate."

Immediately, several hundred questions came to Revan's mind; but Kreia kept moving, and Revan was obliged to keep pace or be lost in the crowd.

She could only vaguely recall the last time that she had seen so many people in a single place, and then it had been a daily occurrence. Now it seemed overwhelming, and more than a little scary... and it didn't help that, as the Jedi Temple faded from view, she knew she would never be able to get back to it on her own.

The men guarding the doors seemed to know Kreia quite well; they let her in without question, and soon she and Revan were sitting at the edge of one of the many boxes dotting the debating chamber.

There were maybe three hundred of them, built into the wall much like boxes at a theatre. Revan had heard that there was talk of building a bigger Senate building, as the current one was becoming too small to handle the new systems - and sentient species - that were continually joining the Republic through one means or another. It was certainly packed today; all of the boxes held representatives of at least three distinct planets, and even the box which Revan and Kreia were in had four Senators leaning out over its edge in addition to several other Jedi.

"Just listen for a moment," Kreia murmured to Revan, who nodded and slipped to the front of the box to get a better look at the speaker.

He was of a species that she did not recognise, tawny-furred and muscular with a great mane of brown about his face and head. He was speaking through a translator, a second, smaller member of his species with a rather less impressive mane.

" - the attack was unprovoked and utterly devastating," he said, as most of the Senate listened in rapt attention. "Cathar is uninhabitable now, and our people are so few and so scattered that we face extinction."

There was a rumble from the listeners, then a voice called, "Cathar is not a member of the Republic. What does this have to do with us?"

"These Mandalorians will not stop at the Outer Rim territories," another voice replied. "We know that they are stockpiling resources. Eventually, they may attack the Republic itself!"

"Nonsense! The Republic has stood for five thousand years -"

Someone cut that speaker off, too, then someone else interrupted the interrupter, and soon the Senate was in disarray; the speaker from Cathar looked utterly bemused at the whole affair, and the Chancellor was calling for order at the top of his voice - but even with his microphone, it wasn't enough to drown everyone else out.

"Does it get like this often?" Revan asked Kreia, who had come up beside her.

"Very frequently. The Senate is not known for its excellence in debating. But forget the rowdy ones; they are making themselves perfectly clear. Turn your attention to those who are not commenting... the delegation from Ryloth, for instance."

Revan looked where Kreia was pointing; sure enough, the Twi'lek senator was sitting back in his chair and surveying the entire scene with a kind of cautious interest.

"Now," Kreia said, so softly that Revan could barely hear her, "I hope you have had some training in the reading of surface thoughts."

"Yes, Master." Actually, it was her best subject.

"Then let us find the Senator's opinion on this affair," Kreia said, and moved away a little. Revan went to follow her, then caught her meaning.

"Here? Now?" Three hundred boxes, about ten people in each box... there had to be three thousand people here. That was far too much interference for any Jedi to hope to pick out an individual thought, wasn't it? Trying was asking for a headache.

"Here," Kreia said. "Now."

Revan sighed, and shut her eyes.

Ordinarily, in a place with only a few other people, this came as easily as breathing. You just opened your mind and listened, and as long as you weren't Malak or someone with similarly pathetic telepathic abilities, it... well, it happened.

Revan didn't want to open her mind in here; she was sure that the sheer mass of mental noise would overwhelm her. She could feel Kreia's gaze on the back of her neck, though, and the desire to not disappoint far outweighed her reservations about giving herself a headache. She wasn't even a proper Padawan yet - Kreia could easily dump her.

Slowly, cautiously, she reached out - and was immediately proved right, as the hubbub of three thousand individual thought patterns emerged from an already rowdy room.

...the Chancellor is weak...

...wonder how Aaili's recital is going?

...Mandalorians will thrash us if we don't take action soon...

...dangerous warriors, but honourable, I've heard...

...don't see the need to argue over this...

...what's for dinner?

Well, this wasn't going to work. There had to be some way of focussing, narrowing it down until she had the mind that she wanted.

She put her mental blocks back up, and thought. What she needed was a filter of some kind, some way to stop all this information from coming in at once. If she could take just part of her blocks down...

A block, as Revan had always visualised it, was a solid thing. It was either up or down, and she quickly discovered this after a few attempts at lowering just a part of it.

Her feet were beginning to hurt by the time it occurred to her that it might be easier to make a hole in the block while it was up. She tried that, pushing parts of it gently to one side, and... yes, now the thoughts were trickling in, and they were much easier to understand, much less overwhelming, but she still had no idea which thought belonged to which person.

She peeped out thought her hole, and saw the mess of life that lay beyond it. It wasn't just the thoughts - they were only a part of it - she needed to separate the Twi'lek from this mess, too. Well, she had a hole now... she let other things begin to trickle through with the thoughts, and soon found that she had a system which seemed to work. You could find other information, too... minds were shaped differently for males and females, and between species, and if that failed then, with a bit of work, she discovered that it was possible to target a mind, following its thoughts back to source, and simply extract the person's name, species and rank directly. Cathar representative? Disgusted with the Republic, convinced he would receive no help from these imbeciles. Cathar translator, hoping that he wouldn't be asked to translate half of what was being said. The Chancellor, considering reforms to help keep the Senate under control during debates. Senator from Duro - oh, he was the one who wanted to know what was for supper, and the Senator from Corellia was the one wondering how her daughter's recital was going.

Metellos, Coruscant, Alderaan, Ithor... Ryloth. He was... pregnant? No, that was his aide, standing next to him and - Revan opened her eyes briefly to take a look - rubbing her belly absent-mindedly. Ah, here he was.

She read his mind, double-checked, and nearly laughed aloud from the sheer brazenness of it.

"He doesn't really care who wins a war, or even if there is one, because both sides will want ryll and dancers... and all the tension is good for business, anyway."

Kreia gave her a rare smile. "Very good, Padawan."

/\/\/\

"Would you like the good news or the bad news?"

"Both, please," Zhar said.

Tyree nodded. "The good news is that Master Dissik has worked out what is wrong with him. The bad news is that it's incurable. He can learn to control it with time, but he'll never be able to function entirely normally in... well, in large crowds of life."

Zhar looked over Tyree's shoulder at the human child sitting on the edge of the bed, exactly where the Healers had put him. He seemed able enough, and not inclined to repeat the outburst that had brought him here in the first place; and he was keeping his head, too, though that could be because nobody was expecting him to do anything besides sit still and answer a few simple questions.

"What exactly is wrong with him?"

Tyree sighed. "He's overwhelmed. Master Dissik said that some Jedi - doesn't matter how capable - can't filter out the background noise very effectively. It's not a problem when there isn't much of it, but on a place teeming with life such as Coruscant..."

"And that isn't something that he can learn?"

"No. Perhaps if he had been younger, say, under four... I haven't asked him, but it's my guess that he's never been on a city world in his life. He can learn to control it, though... Master Dissik says he can get him functioning well enough to restore his eyesight, but he'll probably have to live with the headaches while he's here."

"Would keeping him on Coruscant help?"

Tyree considered this, then said, "A little, I expect. At the very least he should get better at functioning through it. He couldn't even sense when I levitated my lightsaber right next to him, half an hour ago. He won't love you for it, though."

"I doubt he will, but if it will help, then I will apply to the Council for leave to remain until he becomes a Knight. Now, how long until he has his eyesight back?"

/\/\/\

For a human, Zhar thought as he watched Malak dodge shots from the remote droid, the boy wasn't really a bad specimen. He did have a head on his shoulders, as he had demonstrated quite clearly a couple of minutes ago when he dodged the entire Guardian's Gauntlet by the simple expedient of Force-jumping its length. Zhar was still wondering whether he should properly be amused, exasperated, or impressed by that little stunt, and had settled temporarily on a combination of all three. In the meantime, though, his own creative abilities for Third Tests had failed him somewhat and, rather than think up another test on the fly, he had resorted to setting a training droid to a level above what the Padawan should have been training at and setting it loose.

Malak had taken a few hits, mostly from the side - apparently his peripheral vision still wasn't entirely clear, and he claimed that the Force was still too 'noisy' as well. Under the circumstances, though, he was doing rather well, and Zhar was considering putting the droid's level up again when it finally hit Malak for the fifth time and, registering his yelp, shut down.

"Not bad," Zhar said, as Malak switched off his 'saber and left the mat. "Your form is sloppy, though."

"Probably," the boy said, and pulled a face. "I sort of assumed I'd get Consular."

Zhar had been wondering about this ever since he heard of the boy; Malak was large for his age, strong, and by all accounts not particularly good at anything involving tact or diplomacy, so...

"Why make such an assumption?"

"Because I'm good at Healing," Malak said.

"Your marks are middling to the good side of average," Zhar reminded him. "There were plenty in the class who were better than you."

"No, there weren't," Malak said instantly. "The Masters kept telling me not to show off and giving me punishments for hubris, so I stopped doing my best."

Surely, surely the boy could see that claiming to be the best in his class with marks like those was hubris, to a quite astonishing degree. Nevertheless, Zhar had to admit that he had taken a liking to this human; it took guts to stand up to the Council like that, and Malak struck him as a fairly straightforward boy. In fact, knowing what he did of the child, there was a ring of truth to those claims...

"Prove it, then, apprentice. You have five mild burns and I have a twinge in my back. Heal them."

"All right," Malak said, and closed his eyes. What, he wasn't going to make physical contact? Or was he trying to do himself first?

Zhar let his perceptions widen a little, and waited. The boy was doing something in the Force, but it felt entirely different to the way most Healers operated... of course, if Malak truly had been unable to get proper training, and if he truly was a natural talent, then he had probably worked out his own ways of dealing with injuries.

That would, Zhar thought worriedly, make it much harder for Dissik to train Malak.

The first burn that Malak had taken was on his head. It had blistered while he was fighting, but now the blister suddenly popped and, as Zhar watched, collapsed into a tidy little heap of skin which smoothed and healed over. There was barely a mark left, and... wait, had he just grown skin back together? All right, it wasn't dead skin yet, but...

Oh, Force. The boy was a natural talent.

Malak seemed to squint at something through his closed eyes, then opened them suddenly and looked accusingly at Zhar. "There's nothing wrong with your back."

"No," Zhar admitted. "But well done - you passed."

/\/\/\

Ania pinged Kavar during their first lightsaber training session, early that evening.

He had said that he wanted to put her through her paces before they retired for the evening, and she spent ten minutes dodging blaster shots from a training remote before he switched the droid off and engaged her in one-on-one combat. Twenty minutes later, as she ducked out from under his arm, she felt that she was beginning to understand the man. No matter how hard she tried to suppress it, it was no good; five minutes after that, her heart went out to him, and he was pinged.

He signalled for a halt immediately and, once they had left the training mat, called her over. Ania went, hoping desperately that he hadn't noticed.

"You're fast," he told her, ushering her out of the room as he spoke. "I don't know if it's just the precog or if you have good reflexes on top of it, but for someone as small as you it'll be a real advantage. You need to attack more, though; don't rely on tiring your opponent out. A lightsaber-wielder only needs one lucky hit."

"Yes, Master."

"I've no idea what you thought you were doing just before we stopped, though," he said.

Sithspit. Should've known that a Master would notice, and now he was giving her that nasty penetrating look that people always gave her when they noticed it happen. It was embarrassing, was what it was.

"I pinged you, Master. I didn't mean to."

"Oh, I know you didn't mean -" he began, then stopped and looked down at her, eyebrows raised and mouth slightly open. "Pinged me?"

"S'what Revan calls it," Ania said. "She says, when I do it, it feels like it should go ping. You know, if it had a sound."

"I see," he said. "That's... not a bad description, actually. But, Padawan -" he bent his knees a little, and looked her straight in the eye "- do you know what you did?"

"No. It just happens. Happens to everyone I meet." She knew what it meant, though. One more person who would get miserable when she did, angry when she did, bend over backwards to help her, come to her with all their problems and never think, even for a minute, that she might have problems of her own, because she was so busy all the time being happy for them, so they wouldn't all be miserable or angry and reflect it back on her, making her feel even worse...

"Everyone?" Kavar asked incredulously. "Padawan, how many people have you - have you 'pinged'?"

"I dunno. Everyone in classes with me. All the teachers on Dantooine, and the Council, too. People on Metellos, when I was little. Hundreds of people."

"Hundreds," he said, sounding a little faint. "And nobody ever thought to tell you? Good grief. Follow me, we're going to the Library."

/\/\/\

"I'm telling you, Atris, she bonded with me."

Atris glanced over her shoulder at the Padawan - very nearly her own Padawan, if Kavar hadn't insisted - who had plonked herself down behind the door of the library and was fiddling with the hem of her tunic. She was probably listening to every word they said, of course.

"I don't sense anything. Are you sure you were not mistaken?"

"It's weak," he admitted, "but it's there. And she claims to bond with everyone she meets."

"Then she is joking, surely."

"I don't think so," Kavar muttered, then raised his voice. "There's no benefit in picking your clothes to pieces, Padawan. May I suggest meditation as a means of passing the time?"

"Yes, Master, but there's not enough space," Ania said. Kavar and Atris exchanged glances.

"How much space do you need?" he asked. "You'll be sitting still."

"I can't focus if I'm sitting still, Master. Master Vash on Dantooine taught me a moving meditation, but there's really not enough space here."

Kavar, Atris thought as her friend went to help his Padawan make space, seemed to have a talent for biting off more than he could chew. The girl was exceedingly likeable, and powerful too; but she was clearly a fidget, and must surely have somehow tricked him into believing this bonding story. A single Force bond took years to form -

Ania kicked up into a handstand, settling into her meditation, and it was as if someone had turned on the lights.

Force bonds - hundreds of them - began to become 'visible' to Atris, all of them so strong that it was difficult to sense the girl at the middle of it all.

"Oh, my," she breathed.

Kavar left the maelstrom of bonds and came to stand beside her, looking similarly awed. "We were doing combat training when it happened, and I thought I sensed it then, but it's even stronger than I thought."

"It's impossible," Atris whispered. "Years on each one, and they're all so strong -"

He gave her an odd look at that. "Not all of them. My one is terribly weak, I told you before."

"It seems strong enough to me," Atris told him. "It isn't one of the strongest ones, but it certainly is not weak, either."

"This makes no sense," he said quietly, looking worried. "I think we had better go and speak to the Council."

/\/\/\

Master Dissik was a somewhat fussy, but kind, old Miraluka who - according to what he muttered while showing Ania a place to meditate, anyway - had better things to do than identify strange conditions in Padawans. From the way he fell into the rant, muttering under his breath while paying attention to completely different things, Ania got the sense that Padawans were sent to him fairly regularly with strange conditions, and also that she and her friends might be able to do this impression word-for-word by the time they made Knights. Malak almost certainly would.

She had been meditating in the middle of the infirmary floor for an hour when Kavar and Atris appeared, with the rest of the Council in tow. She knew that the Council were there, not so much by their presence in the Force, as by the way they ooh'ed and aah'ed as they slipped through the door. Really, she didn't see what was so fascinating about it. Nobody had ever commented before.

"Yes, yes, it's a beautiful display," Dissik said impatiently. "It's not natural, though. Or healthy, for that matter."

"What exactly is it?" Atris' voice asked.

"Can't tell you exactly... you people don't have any records of it. I've seen it before, though, on my homeworld... chap ended up going mad."

Oh, that was comforting, Ania thought darkly as she pushed her body into a bridge.

"She seems stable enough," Kavar objected.

"Looks can be deceiving," Dissik said, and Ania suddenly liked him a lot more. "These bonds she forms aren't healthy. The gift, if you can call it that, is to form bonds quickly and with almost no effort, but a bond - a proper bond - goes both ways. She develops this great understanding with us, but it'll take years for our side of the bond to reach the same intensity as hers."

"I can see why that's not natural, but I don't understand how -"

"She affects us, but we don't affect her," Dissik said. "Rather than forming partnerships in the Force, she forms... coercions, I suppose. She provokes strong emotions in us, but we only provoke very weak ones in her... so if she gets angry, we'll get angry too, possibly even angrier than she is, but if we get angry she'll barely feel it. It's enough to drive anyone mad; the only way for her to avoid it is to project, well, constant happiness."

There was silence for a long while. Then Kavar said, slowly, "Come to think of it, I have been in a remarkably good mood ever since she bonded with me."

"How awful," a voice that Ania didn't recognise murmured, and several others made noises of assent.

"Of course, it might be different for her," Dissik said, though he sounded doubtful. "No two Force-users are the same."

/\/\/\

Malak was in Tyree's little office - well, it was more of a cupboard, really - discussing the finer points of the new technique that he had been hastily taught earlier that day. The door was open, though, and the conversation drifted through... try as he might, he could not concentrate properly when they were talking about one of his best friends right outside the door. Finally, Tyree decided that Malak was too tired to carry on tonight and let him go, leaving him with twenty minutes of unexpected free time in which to go and find Ania. He didn't have to go far; she was in a bed in the infirmary, with her face buried in her pillow.

"An?"

"Go away," she said, and pulled the covers over her head. Malak, who was used to this sort of thing from Revan's infrequent but destructive temper tantrums, poked her in the ribs.

"Why didn't you tell us?"

"I said, go away."

"You're not going to go mad and die right this minute," Malak said, which he felt was the most sensible thing to say under the circumstances. "And you'll have to leave eventually. And you're acting like Revan after a screaming fit."

"No I'm not. Not enough broken stuff lying around."

"Why didn't you tell us?" Malak asked again. Eventually, he was sure, Ania would answer just to get rid of him. That was how it worked on Revan, anyway.

"Tell you what? That I can control how you feel all the time, and I only don't 'cos I'm such a nice person? Yeah, you'd both take that real well."

As Malak leaned over to tug the covers away from her, he realised that the pillow and sheets were wet. But Ania never -

"An, are you crying?"

"Crying? Me? 'Course not. Happy happy happy, that's me. Always so fracking happy. Have you ever known me cry?"

"Well, no -" Malak began.

"Then you ain't been lookin' hard enough," Ania snapped. "Jus' like everyone else."

" - but then, I wouldn't expect to, with what I know now," he finished. "An, look, I want to help. And you know I'll tell Revan, and between us we can make you let us help, so you might as well just let us."

Silence for a moment, then Ania lifted her head and glared at him through bloodshot eyes. "That's wossname, blackmail," she said, but the effect was somewhat diminished by the long trail of snot coming out of her left nostril.

"Knew you'd see it my way eventually," Malak said, and offered her his handkerchief.

/\/\/\

Revan took the news far, far better than Ania had expected, though that might have been because Ania chose to tell her in the middle of a training session and while Revan was on the mat. She had hoped that Revan would fail to notice at all, but that particular thought was rapidly dashed when Revan, immediately after finishing her session, came and sat down next to Ania, staring at her in astonishment.

"What did you just say?"

Ania explained again, as patiently as she could when her nervous fidget was back.

"And you never told me," Revan said quietly. "Why not, An? Malak's right, we could have helped."

"Didn't think you'd like the idea," Ania muttered.

"I don't," Revan snapped. "But it's not your fault, is it? Like Malak's headaches. If you could turn it off, I bet you would."

"Well, yeah, but -"

"Well, there you are, then," Revan said. "Not like I didn't know you were an empath, anyway. Just never realised how it worked before."

Kavar was watching her as Ania made her way over to him, grinning like an imbecile.

"I take it that went well?"

"Yeah," Ania said, as she tried - and failed - to wipe the grin off her face. "Looks like Malak warned her." It was the only plausible explanation, after all; usually, the only conversations that she had ever had with Revan like that were mutual apologies.

"For the better, I hope?"

"Definitely."