Just Your Average Jedi

[Zane Brasko]

"Don't -"

Zane gasped; every breath he took felt like a lung-full of acid burning away at his insides, but his body was desparate to grab hold of every scrap of oxygen it could find, no matter how much it hurt.

"Please -"

His muscles trembled, limbs feeling like lead. Every inch of him, inside and out, ached with a relentless passion. It was a cruel torture he was being subjected to, and he knew with absolute certainty that if it didn't come to an end soon, he would come to an end. This wasn't how it was supposed to happen. Jedi were supposed to die noble deaths, protecting the innocent, defending the galaxy. Not like this.

"Wait -"

Finally he stopped running, his limbs refusing to continue moving. Air wheezed it's way into his lungs; his arms grabbed at his knees in a vain attempt to hold himself in something that vaguely passed for upright.

His lungs inflated, and he sucked on his tongue, trying to moisten his parched throat. "Come back here, you bastard little droid!" he shouted, glaring down the corridor at the little astromech that was trundling triumphantly away. "Come back with my kriffing lunch!"

[Cleo Némain]

Fate was important. While it wasn't the be-all, end-all and Cleo believed heavily in the aspect of free will and that no one's destinies were really set down completely from the beginning of time and people could always break free from whatever cycles the future had planned for them and... well... fate was important.

Not that she would ever say what happened next was fate's design. Or fault. Or... well, okay so fate was important but maybe not right at this exact moment. This exact moment all that was important was that she heard the yell that sounded horribly desperate and came around a bend in a corridor just in time to see an astromech droid speeding towards her. A split second glance down the way and she saw the hapless victim clutching his side in pain, looking mournful in a way she hadn't seen in a long damn time.

No time to lose! Cleo put on her best stern face and stepped out in the middle of the hallway, hands on her hips, legs ready to run to either dodge or give chase and she stared the droid down like a woman on a mission. Which, she was. Well, now she was. She hadn't been before but that was before and this was now and...

"Hol' it righ' thereish!"

Not the most profound statement, but she did her best mum impression, and sometimes that was more than enough to scare small children. Maybe it'd work on droids too.

[Trip]

Headpiece inclining to provide his ocular receptor with a better angle on his humanoid obstacle, tactical subprocessors hardwired into Trip's droid brain ran a series of rapid threat assessment programs. While facial recognition did not yield a match in his internal identity database - unfortunately meaning that he had no preferred form of address recorded on-file - he did find a 98.3% certainty match with an individual from the Whaladon passenger manifest, which he had downloaded the last time he was in proximity to an unsecured dataport.

Servos in his forelimbs moved his chassis into an approximation of a bow: a proceedure that his behavioural software determined would demonstrate compliance. His headpiece tilted slightly to the right, an action intended to convey an inquiry; his crude vocabulator buffered an interrogative inflection in order to illustrate that more clearly.

"Apologies, Padawan Cleo Némain, but you are obstructing my designated route. For what purpose are you interrupting Priority Item Retrieval Directive one-one-four-point-three-dash-nine?"

[Cleo Némain]

She felt herself make a face, the kind where your nose gets all scrunched up and you look about as perplexed as you feel. It didn't make no sense, nope, none at all.

"I in'rupt cuza seems tha' your missio', que', thin' ...has gone anna made someone else nah so 'appy." Cleo nodded down the hall towards the winded boy. "Who wen' anna charged ya wit' takin' someone's grub, eh? Dun seem righ' ta me, Droidy."

That was the problem, right there, droids didn't just do things for the fun of it most days. Usually they were following orders, which meant someone else had told him to go and be a lunch-thief. And that was something Cleo just wasn't going to let go by. There were enough problems with supplies on The Wheel without people stealing from each other.

[Trip]

Trip continued his puzzled look subroutines, the servos that focused the lenses in his ocular receptor twitching slightly as his voice recognition software ran a best-fit comparison with all known languages in his database, trying to decipher sentient Cléo Nemain's latest verbal transmission.

"Operational Protocol Alpha," Trip recited, deciding that the Padawan's memory banks did not have an existing record of his basic operating criteria. "Droid unit most not injure an organic being, or through inaction allow an organic being to come to harm."

His forelimbs rolled back in again, straightening his chassis slightly; his headpiece adjusted it's angle to maintain the sensor lock on the human.

"Emergency medical analysis concludes that over-consumption of foodstuffs containing high sugar and saturate content with little or no nutritional value constitutes harm being comitted to a human of Padawan Zane Brasko's biometric profile. Directive one-one-four-point-three-dash-nine was enacted in order to comply with Protocol Alpha."

Trip's headpiece bowed a little in a simulation of shame.

"Did my medical analysis make a calculation in error, Mistress Jedi?"

[Cleo Némain]

It made... sense. Well, she thought so, and then she didn't think so and then she wasn't all that sure.

"Sa'... is nah sa' much lunch assa jus' junk stuffs? Anna you're gonna keep 'im from eatin' it sa it dun get all fa' anna gross anna die wit' pie in his 'and?"

Cleo frowned and looked down the hall at the other Padawan again.

"Bu' in doin' wha' you're doin' ya take away 'is free wills and tha's nah righ' neither."

[Zane Brasko]

Breathing was still difficult, but that was fine. Clearly, he'd been running so fast that the air just hadn't been able to get into his lungs properly. While he was perfectly happy to just stand there breathing heavily whenever this kind of situation presented, he supposed that there was some sort of Jedi teaching or other that would tell him to seek out a solution. Idly, he wondered if running with his mouth wide open would help.

While his breathing was still experiencing problems however, his hearing was not. Granted, he was quickly coming to learn that hearing what the quirky red-head had said and actually understanding it were two very different things, but he thought he'd at least picked up the gist of it.

Did she call me fat?

He bristled a little at that, but the next realisation made things worse.

Did the droid call me fat?

That was enough to make him undouble himself and start marching down the corridor to the exchange, whether his lungs had anything in them or not. "I am not -" he tried, but it came out as more of a wheeze. Doing too much at once, obviously. He stopped, composed himself. "I am not that fat," he protested through clenched teeth, his arms folding defiantly across his chest.

[Cleo Némain]

Cleo watched the approach, betting with herself on whether he was going to actually make it or not. Which wasn't nice, but sometimes you just couldn't help the not-nice thoughts and besides, it was the droid's fault she was thinking those things anyway! Mean droidy.

"A'course you're nah. Ne're said ya was."

She took a long sidestep to suddenly be at the boy's side. She saw the move in movies, animated ones mostly, but it implied sneakiness which is what she wanted and she brought up a hand to hide her mouth... even if she didn't try and lower her voice any.

"Was the droidy. I'ma thinkin' he's gotta bad urhm... dohicky... tha's makin' him take the pro'tectin' people bit a bit ta far."

Her eyes suddenly widened and she stepped back between the droid and the boy.

"Bu' you lied! Lunch is nah cake, orra cookies, orra ...well...whatever you gots that the droidy said is:" She paused to try and think of each word carefully. "foodstuffs-c'ntainin'-lotsa-sugar-anna-sat'rate-fillins-wit-lil'-orra-nah-'tritional-value."

She ended with a nod of her head, satisfied she got exactly what the droidy had said. Because that was important, since it wasn't her words.

[Zane Brasko]

Zane fixed the impudent girl with a scowl, folding his arms firmly across his chest. Getting judged by a droid was one thing. Getting judged by a girl who didn't even seem capable of talking properly was another thing entirely.

"I have a very busy schedule," he insisted, staring her down as best he could. "I have been working long hours, helping out with repairs and maintainance on top of my Jedi studies. Sometimes -" He waved a hand vaguely. "- it helps to have something with a little sugar or carbs in. Something to keep my brain and body ticking over."

His eyes narrowed. "And besides, do you have any idea how much trouble I went to in order to get a hold of those things? Do you know how many favours I had to trade with Rebel mechanics and freighter crews to even get that in the first place?"

"Besides." His efforts as glaring failed, his face contorting into something decidedly more like a pout. "What business is it of yours what I eat? It's a free galaxy."