Roomies (Kala)

[Akasha Khan]

Scant hours after setting foot on the Whaladon, Akasha Khan was following a scrawled set of directions on a piece of flimsy down one of the transport's narrow, under-lit corridors in search of a stateroom labeled D44. As a working vessel, there was very little wasted space on the bulk transport. Living quarters were squeezed in wherever they could fit among the cargo holds and machine works. From the throbbing hum that reverberated through the deck panels, it seemed Akasha had found her way to the engine deck. She thought she must have made a wrong turn when she saw a tired-eyed Togruta boy wander out of a doorway in his nightshirt and into a washroom. It seemed she'd found the living quarters for the Jedi youth.

D44 was farther up toward the prow of the ship, mercifully farther away from the the drone of the engines. Akasha knocked on the metal hatch and, hearing no response, stabbed the access panel with her free paw.

The door hissed open to reveal what could generously be called a stateroom. It was almost as tall as it was wide, a pair of bunks receded into the wall on the left, a plain-looking desk standing against the wall to the right, underneath the bottom bunk a drawer that looked large enough to hold precisely two sets of robes and tunics. It was every bit as spartan as the huts in the Mandalorian village, but where Granoi had mounted hunting trophies, armor, and weapons, this one had holopictures of green-skinned humanoids and coral reefs, and on the desk was a glass bowl holding sand, seashells, and a string of fiery pearls.

Akasha let her small shoulder bag dangle to her elbow as she looked over her absent roommate's decor. The water in the holos was so blue she almost felt she'd get her fur wet if she came too close, but she was fascinated by the colorful shells in the bowl. Idly she scooped up a pawful, wondering what sort of creature had inhabited each one.

Finally she spared another glance for the smiling faces in what she took to be a family photo. Green, slippery-looking skin, black, void-like eyes, something that looked like a mess of tentacles coming off the backs of their heads... If that was what her roommate looked like, this was going to take some getting used to.

She'd just reached to pick up the nearest framed photo from the desk when she heard the door slide open behind her.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

Patience.

Perhaps one of the central tenets of Jedi teachings...one must be patient in all things.

Really, that was so much easier said than done, when one was seventeen years old and eager to officially begin upon the path of becoming a Jedi. Kala understood the need for it, and did her level best to be patient.

There was only so much she could take of everyone telling her to 'be patient, it will happen' or 'the Force moves as it will, not as we will it'. She understood that. Truly, she did. But she was growing bored with nothing to do and no one to learn from. It was enough to drive even someone with Kala's level of patience to complete distraction.

Much like Ilias did with seemingly little effort.

Gee, think about him much?

Shut up, Rin. Now is not-

...

-there's someone in my room.

Someone, Kala noted, of a felinoid species, and not one she'd seen before. The creature had scooped up a pawful of her shell collection and was gazing down at them curiously, a small bag in the crook of her arm. This must be the roomate she was told would be coming soon.

With a smile, she stepped into the room and let the door close behind her. "Those are from Glee Anselm...in fact that picture was taken the day I started collecting them. I'm Kala...and you must be my new roomate. My apologies that I haven't made any room for you yet. I didn't know you'd be here today."

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha's ears dipped guiltily at having been caught going through someone else's stuff. She quickly deposited the shells back in their bowl, dropped one, grabbed at it as it rattled across the table, and dropped it in as well.

"Oh, ah... I didn't really know I'd be here, either," she admitted. "My name's Akasha."

The Orryxian gave the newcomer a quick once-over. She did not look like the smiling green humanoids in the pictures - well, she was in the pictures, but Akasha had taken her to be a friend of the family. She was tall and slender, had a flowing golden mane, and, strangely, smelled faintly of fish.

"That's Glee Anselm?" Akasha said, glancing again at the holos. "It looks very... wet."

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

"Pleased to meet you Akasha. Oh don't worry...you can play with the shells whenever you like. That's why I collected them in the first place."

Kala replied brightly as she stepped forward, looking up as Akasha did towards the pictures that covered most of the wall.

"I don't imagine you would like it much...Glee Anselm is primarily a water world. There's little land, really. There are some very pretty islands though. I was born there. That holopic there...that's my family. Tall one in the middle is my father, the others are my uncles, aunts, and cousins." Tilting her head, she smiled at the memory of the day, fingers absently pulling her hair back into a ponytail. The silver in her hair was barely visible, but the marks along her neck and shoulder plainly were, beneath the straps of her tanktop.

"I hope this isn't an offensive question...but, I've never seen anyone like you before. Where are you from?"

[Akasha Khan]

By now, Akasha had grown used to the idea that most people she'd meet would have never heard of her species before. That was just as well, as she'd never heard of Glee Anselm before, either.

"Orryxia," she said. "It's in the Outer Rim, near Eriadu." She gave the fiercely blue underwater holos a second look and said, "It's mostly mountains. We've got good reason to stay away from the oceans."

Akasha stole another glance at the girl and picked out a few more details that seemed out-of-place for a human - the purple eyes and the trail of silvery-blue spots that flowed down the sides of her neck like the markings of a mackerel.

"You don't look much like your family," she said, not really thinking of the possible ramifications of such a fact.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

"That's because my mother was human, not Nautolan like my father."

Kala replied simply, walking over to her bunk and withdrawing a small silver disk from one of the small built-in nooks. Holding it out in the palm of her hand, she pressed the green crystal button and activated the holoprojector. A wistful smile formed on her features as the blue-tinted image sprang up, of a lovely woman in a loose, flowing gown standing beside a slightly younger version of her father. At their feet sat a pair of chubby toddlers happily gnawing on their stuffed bantha toys.

"She was from Chandrila, I was told. A Doctor, in fact, before she met and married my father. That was unorthodox in and of itself, given that my father was a Jedi."

She stared for a moment before flicking the device off and tucking it into the pocket of her shorts, smiling sheepishly. "That's probably far more than you wanted to know...I just have a hard time remembering to stop chattering. Can I help you make room for things? I've kept one of the drawers empty under the bunks in anticipation, and one of the drawers in the desk is empty as well...could take some of my holopics down to give you space to hang some of your own things...aww dammit, I'm babbling again, I'm sorry. Its a terrible habit."

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha wondered for a moment whether Kala's mother was dead or out of favor with the family, considering she didn't appear in any of what the Orryxian assumed were the more recent holos, if the two pudgy larva things at the bottom of the picture were any indication. But she decided that would probably be a touchy subject. Maiur knew if Akasha had a picture of her mother, she'd most likely use it for target practice.

She gestured to the little duffel dangling from her elbow. "This is all I have," she said. "Probably can all fit in one of those drawers."

She bent over to pull one of the bunk-side drawers open and look inside, giving Kala a clear view of the short, white cylinder dangling from a clip on her belt.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

"Alright...I'll leave the desk drawers open for you anyway, just in case. Its only fair that we share the space equally." Kala smiled and pulled the small desk chair out to sit as Akasha pulled open the drawer to settle her things.

Tilting her head, the blonde took note of the short, white cylinder, fingers reaching back to unclip the pair that she never went anywhere without. She held them lightly, the longer, well-worn and rugged silver hilt in her right hand, and the more delicate and shiny hilt in her left.

"Did you build the 'saber yourself, Akasha?" Kala asked, curiosity writ across her features.

[Akasha Khan]

It took Akasha a moment to realize what Kala was talking about.

"Oh - no, this isn't a lightsaber," she said, and she straightened up and slid the device out of its clip. "Though I've been told it's just as rare."

The Orryxian gripped the cylinder horizontally and did something subtle with her paw, and, with a metallic rasp, it expanded suddenly in both directions. In the blink of an eye, Akasha held a seamless white staff, tapered slightly at both ends and roughly equal to her height.

"It's an Echani fighting staff," she said. "I honestly don't know how it works, but it does. It was a gift from... well, it's a long story."

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

"Ohhh...that's the neatest thing I think I've ever seen..."

Kala echoed softly, peering at it respectfully from where she sat. Her father and mother both had always preached about weapon etiquette - you did not touch a weapon that was not yours without an express invitation to do so. It was the quickest way to insult a substantial number of cultures and ethnicities. Setting her hilts on the surface of the desk, she looked back up at Akasha.

"I like long stories. Be curious to hear it if you don't mind telling it." She smiled, resting her chin on her knees as she drew them up against her chest, heels resting on the edge of her seat.

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha shrugged and began idly twirling her staff back and forth in the limited space of the room. "Well, I'm not much of a storyteller. I got it on a jungle world, though. That was where the bounty hunter dropped me off after rescuing me from Klatooine. I'd been a slave there, in the house of Jaarhu the Hutt. Well, not so much in his house as in his fighting pits, really, but I was only there because I had to run away from my mother, who wanted me dead."

She said it all as if she were describing the plot of a holo she'd seen, and not one she particularly liked. But then she realized she was going the wrong direction, and her spinning staff stopped.

"Er - I'm sorry. Where was I, again?"

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

She felt her mouth drop open and a response die on her tongue. She was so...so...calm and collected as she related something that horrified Kala to her core. She couldn't imagine dealing with what Akasha had been through, let alone be so calm about it.

Blinking, she was silent for several moments before she managed to close her mouth and force her mind back into some semblance of thought.

"I...I'm sorry that your mother wasn't more like mine. Everyone should have a mother like I had. And a father...and a twin brother, even though he annoyed the hell out of me most of the time. But that's neither here nor there...you were telling me about your staff." Kala said quietly, lilac eyes wide with a mixture of sympathy and curiosity.

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha was genuinely surprised by Kala's reaction - she seemed much more profoundly affected than Akasha was by her own life story, and Akasha hadn't even been telling it well. But then, Orryxians tended to have little emotional connection to the past. Put any of her tormentors before her, and Akasha would gladly cut out their organs in pieces small enough to chew, but for now she was out of their grasp, and that was all that mattered. Real sympathy was a strange thing for a feline mind to grasp.

"Family's a different sort of matter on Orryxia," she said, feeling a strange impulse to comfort Kala about her own circumstances. "In a lot of ways, they're your closest competition. Sometimes it's civil, and sometimes it's not."

The Orryxian looked about at the family holos Kala had hung all around her little room. She understood a little better that they were more than archival, and Kala no doubt understood a little better why Akasha had no such mementos.

"More important than family are pridemates. The people you hunt with. Who'll watch your back, and teach you, and fight with you, and make you better. The bounty hunter who rescued me from the Hutt left me in the care of a Mandalorian woman named Granoi, on Verdanth. Huh, and I thought the Hutt was harsh."

Despite herself, she offered Kala a shadowy smile. "Granoi threw me in with the kids in the village she was training in the ways of the Mando'ade. We were like a pack of beasts in the wild, hunting, being hunted, sometimes fighting for dominance. But we were always together, and always looking out for one another. They called it clan. You would probably call it family. But for me, they were the first pride I had ever had to call my own. I lived and trained among them until the bounty hunter returned to take me here, to learn the ways of the Force with the Jedi."

She paused, considered the staff in her paw, and then passed it to Kala for her to hold and examine. After all, hearing was nothing compared to touch.

"Mando'a tradition says that a child leaves home at age eight to start its military training - a boy with his father, a girl with her mother. In either case, the parent gives the child a weapon to wield. Orryxians age differently than you humans - I may not look it, but I'm eight cycles old. So Granoi gave me this staff to use in my training here, since she knew she could not come with me."

Akasha winked. "Of course, that's just as well. I've had more than enough bruises from that woman already."

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

"Growing up like that is a completely foreign concept to me in so many ways. I can understand it, though...one of my father's friends was a Mando'ade. I remember his stories about what it was like to live and thrive in the Mandalorian culture. They're all gone now, though...he and his daughter are the last ones left of their clan." Kala nodded softly, eyes widening with a measure of delight as Akasha passed her staff over.

Unfurling herself from the tucked position she'd been resting in, she tossed it lightly to find its weight and let it roll across her fingers to find its balance. She had no doubt it was a strong, highly resistant weapon, but it was also elegant and very nearly sculptural as it caught the light.

She laughed softly and nodded at Akasha's last phrase. "I can understand that. One of my aunts back on Glee Anselm would drive my brother and I mercilessly as she taught us swimming and diving. Alot of it is instinctual for Nautolans, and some of it came easily for us being half human. The rest of it was drilled into us really early. I learned to swim before I could walk. I wouldn't change a minute of it though...she taught me to cliff dive on a trip to Naboo and its the most amazing sensation ever."

Lightly handing the staff back, she resumed her seat and pulled the ribbon out of her hair, letting her silver streaked curls tumble loose. "I've been aboard the Wheel for months though...and I've only been planet-side once, for Life Day. I think I would shave a year off of my life for the chance to go swimming and spend a few days on a planet."

[Akasha Khan]

"I'm not much of a swimmer," Akasha said, though she hardly had to; her recoiling from the all-too-real underwater holos probably had told Kala all she needed to know. "I've done a little... in lakes and rivers. But the oceans on my homeworld are not nice at all. Go swimming there, and you're likely to be eaten."

She looked at the fishy faces in the holos and back at her very mammalian-looking roommate. "So you're really half Nautolan?" she said, and it was clear she wasn't sure whether to believe it. "It's just... you don't look like a fish at all."

It didn't even occur to her that she was being entirely inappropriate.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

Akasha's comment elicited a giggle from the tall blonde as she padded over to stand with her, staring up at her wall of holopics.

"I know...I take after my mother very much. Human-Nautolan crosses aren't very common, so no one knew what to expect when my brother and I were born."

Pulling her hair away from her neck and holding up both hands, Kala continued, "If you look closely enough at that holopic of my father standing alone, you'll see that my marks match his almost exactly. That's a Nautolan trait, and since my mother was human, there were no other genetics for marks to interfere with the pattern. My skin color here on my fingers is a paler version of my father's blue-green skin, even the silver...though you can't see that in the picture. The marks go down my neck, across my shoulders and all the way down my back and my legs to my feet."

Touching the edge of the holopic of her and Rin standing with one another on a rock on the beach, she scrolled to one of them splashing in the water and completely soaked. "See this one? This only happens when I'm soaking wet. My hair goes all silver, my eyes go a solid dark shade of lilac. The eye color comes from my mom. The longer I'm in the water, the more of my skin turns that silvery-blue color. My brother turned more green where I turned blue though, so he took after my dad a bit more that way. And before you ask, no, I don't have gills. Don't need them...my lungs are perfectly suited to both air and water."

Giggling, Kala shook her head "I'm a color-changing Jedi...just add water for hours of entertainment!"

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha watched with equal parts interest and scandal as Kala showed off the results of her genetic roulette. Human-Cizerack, Human-Falleen, Human-Twi'lek... humans spread their genetic material like it was going out of style. For Akasha, Kala was just one more alien, but she shuddered to think about the possibility of an Orryxian halfbreed. And yet Kala was so comfortable displaying her uniqueness, perfectly at home in her body. An Orryxian could respect that.

"So is your brother a Jedi, too?" Akasha asked.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

Akasha's question gave her pause. It wasn't that she wasn't anticipating it, given all the talk of family that was going on. What she wasn't prepared for was the unexpected silence in her mind and the sharp pain it evoked.

"Rin would have been a Knight by now if...if he'd lived. He was amazing at everything he did. Made me look like an ugly, awkward bantha calf."

The smile fled from her features as she gazed up at the picture the scrolling holoframe had stopped on, one of her and Rin standing side by side on a sandy beach. Thankfully the frame flipped to another pic soon after, and she finally remembered to breathe.

"My mother died when Rin and I were seven, and my father and Rin died almost three years ago. On our fourteenth birthday. I left Glee Anselm after that and haven't been back but once since then."

[Akasha Khan]

"Oh... sorry."

A stupid, perfunctory non-response - but even Akasha couldn't mistake the pain of deep-seated wounds. She thought of Lanai, the way she'd felt when her closest pridemate, a human girl younger than Kala, had been injured and almost killed by the beast they were hunting.

And then she thought, Maiur's mane, three years? Almost half her own waking life. If a longer lifespan meant a longer memory for the universe's cruelties, she wasn't certain who had the better end of the bargain.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

Shaking her head, she returned to the desk and perched atop it, arms wrapped around her knees. Her chin rested atop a knee as she eventually found a small smile.

"There's nothing to be sorry about. My birthday is coming up in a few weeks, so I've been a little sensitive to the topic lately. Most of the time I can concentrate on the good memories." Kala said softly, freeing one hand to toy with the bowl of shells.

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha nodded mutely, not really knowing what else to do. She couldn't help thinking that if her own brother had died three years ago instead of Kala's, her mother would have had no reason to seek her life, and Akasha would probably still be living comfortably in the Khan household. But then, she would never have discovered her gift with the Force, either. It was hard to even imagine that now.

"So you'll be seventeen?" Akasha said, having just done the math. "Maiur, you humanoids are weird, you could almost be my mother!"