Lost In Translation

[Wyl Staedtler]

Antagonism was not a sport that Wyl Staedtler was keen on playing. It was true that he often looked up to find himself inexplicably in the middle of mayhem, an unfortunate side effect in his relentless pursuit to learn everything there was to know while simultaneously restoring the order of justice where he could. He knew, too, that his Force-guided ability to root out unspoken wonder bore with it a burden of irritation; there were some who simply stumbled into the crossfire of his discoveries and came out worse for wear. It was regrettable, but there was little that the padawan could do about it. The important distinction to make was that Wyl didn't enjoy ruffling feathers. Intentionally wielding malice was an act reserved for a very rare, very small list of beings and beyond that trifling collection, he regretted it deeply whenever his escapades yielded collateral damage.

That being said, however: Abarai Loki would rue the day he collaborated against Wyl in a most nefarious plot.

Perhaps it wasn't fair to place all the blame on the young Jedi's shoulders, for he was only accepting a task that had been asked of him by (that traitor) Inyos Aamoran. Nevertheless, he was the most visible obstacle between Wyl and his rightful inheritance and so the brunt of the boy's desperate ire was directed at his fellow comrade.

While his reputation for hijinks preceded him and thus brought with it a natural suspicion, it also granted him a level of freedom that was incredibly useful. It was normal to spy Wyl trundling down corridors with that particular sharp look in his eyes that attested to a mission, usually with Tak at his side, both of them toting a collection of necessary tools to accomplish whatever task they'd set for themselves. No one gave it a second thought when he walked by with a servodriver or hydrospanner in hand. The madness was impossible to prevent and eventually whatever quest the boy was on would be revealed; it was simply easier to sit back and let things unfold naturally.

Which was how he'd managed to get this far lugging a sack of tools (courtesy of Morgan's impressive supply) over his shoulder with only a few nods of acknowledgement. It wasn't a long way to Loki's quarters and thanks to the strict schedule that the Jedi kept, Wyl knew that he had plenty of time to spare. The anxious feeling in his stomach couldn't be helped, though. He'd never done a full B&E on his own. The process itself was fairly simple in terms of mechanical breakdown, but without the moral support of his wife... well, it just didn't feel the same.

Focus, Wyl. Eyes on the prize.

Now was not the time to lose focus. Wyl sighed, paused in his trek to shift the strap of the bag where it was beginning to dig into his shoulder, and then squawked as the shifting weight threatened to pitch him sideways. At the last possible second he bailed, shrugging out from under the tote and spinning away. The bag landed on the durasteel planking with a solid clatter, an assortment of tools skittering across the floor in an abrasive chorus.

"You laserbrain," Wyl berated, smacking a hand against his forehead. With a rumbling sigh, the boy dropped to his knees and began to gather up the scattered supplies. This was not a sign that all was going to go wrong. This was just an unforeseen complication.

[Adia Issoris]

Adia walked with a natural silence, but years of training had made her even quieter. She always had boots with a layer of soft, pliant material that made almost no noise. Her choice of fabric emitted little sound under friction, and every item she carried was strapped carefully to her belt. A clank could be the difference between life and death in her line of work, and years of practice had made her precise and careful.

Wyl was caught completely unawares until Adia hefted one of Morgan's larger spanners. It was an adjustable torque-sensitive model, and was nearly as long as Wyl's arm. She was impressed by his raw motivation and gumption as she hefted the two kilo tool.

"Wyl, why do you have Morgan's torque spanner?" She asked, her voice a mix of motherly curiosity and amusement.

[Wyl Staedtler]

Maybe Daria had a point about being aware of your surroundings. It was certainly a valuable skill when it came to ensuring one didn't die prematurely of a heart attack. There weren't many threats aboard the Wheel that needed anticipating, but those that did exist struck with a vengeance.

Wyl jerked back with a violent start, a half-formed noise tumbling from his mouth.

"Adia!" The boy yelped, his tone an accusation. Wyl's scrawny chest rose and fell in a gallop as he tried to catch up to his breath, the shock of being caught out blooming across his cheeks in high colour. Leaning over to slap a palm on a runaway washer, the boy gave a concentrated shrug of his shoulders.

"What? Oh, nothing. It's just... good to have things on hand. In case of, um. Emergencies."

[Adia Issoris]

Adia was somewhat impressed by the boy's singular focus and motivation, but she knew when she was being fed an inexpert half-truth. Whatever it was, it was an emergency, of sorts. It was important enough for the boy to lug 3/4 of his weight in Morgan's tools.

She bent down and grabbed the duffel bag with a collective clanking of loose metal on metal. In a friendly manner, she replaced the dropped tools into the bag. Wyl looked visibly relieved.

"If you're carrying this much, it must be an emergency now." She said. Adia knew that children weren't stupid, but they could be emotionally simple and usually didn't have enough knowledge to plan effectively. Whatever Wyl was doing, it required tools. Wyl looked like he'd had a brilliant stroke of luck. Adia easily shouldered the full bag of tools.

"We'd better get to it, then." Adia added.

[Wyl Staedtler]

At first it seemed as though the tides were rolling in Wyl's direction. It was nice, for a change. Constantly swimming against the current was an exhausting practice, even for someone with as much moxie as Wyl had. The ability to judge the limits of one's abilities and then work around them was a crucial factor in survival.

So he was all too glad to allow Adia to shoulder his mighty burden for a moment, if only because it allowed him to move on toward his ultimate purpose.

"Well, I wouldn't say now's an emergency, necessarily," Wyl amended as he trotted beside the woman. This could get very sticky if he didn't manage it properly.

The boy screwed up his face in thought, searching for the right word.

"It's more of a... a day with the potential for emergencies. And a good Jedi is always prepared for any outcome. So, you know. Once we get down the hall I'll probably be okay, if you need to be somewhere or something."

[Adia Issoris]

"As in, if we can't get this done soon, it's going to be an emergency." Adia said, and the boy nodded. Goodness, she thought, I don't think there is any way I could have figured a six year old Morgan out when I was younger.

You need a lookout, don't you." Her Coruscanti accent was warm. It wasn't a question, of course. She knew he needed a lookout because it was something of mischievous means. He stopped and looked back at her, unsure of how much he could tell Adia.

"Normally, Pil..., I mean Tak, is my lookout." Wyl quickly corrected himself. He didn't explicitly state that he needed a lookout, just that Tak was normally his lookout. They continued down the hall.

"Wyl, you realize you can't prepare for everything. Not only is that impossible, but it's a poor idea."

[Wyl Staedtler]

Well, the universe was just full of surprises, wasn't it?

The last thing that Wyl had expected to find in Adia was a cohort. He didn't know the woman as well as he could have, mostly due to the fact that the first time he'd seen her she'd been making a Morgan-skewer with an efficiency that was alarming. That sort of thing tended to breed a healthy wariness.

It seemed that he needed to reevaluate that particular conclusion.

"That's dumb," the boy stated plainly, making a face. There was no judgement in his voice; it was simply an observation, as though he were stating something as obvious as 'space is dark'.

Wyl continued, "Just because something is difficult," impossible wasn't a word he particularly liked or believed in, "doesn't mean you shouldn't prepare for it. Like... maybe it's impossible to fend off an army of mentally unhinged mutant nuna hounds but you'd still get ready, just in case, wouldn't you?"

[Adia Issoris]

"Wyl, do you know what triage is?" Adia asked. The boy started to answer, but the unsure look told her all she needed to know. He shook his head.

"Triage is putting the likely, immediate things first. Once you do that, then comes the improbable." She said. She didn't want to discourage his imagination, nor his spirit. Adia only wanted to plant the seeds of responsibility for a later time.

“Well, then the nuna hounds would get you!” Wyl countered.

“I’m sure I could take an army of mutant nuna hounds, deranged or not.” She patted the lightsaber at her hip. Wyl considered this. It made sense that Adia wouldn’t be worried about mutant nuna hounds, and she was sure he could conjure dozens of equally absurd but more dangerous scenarios. Wyl held up a finger to be quiet, and then “snuck” to the offending door. His technique needed work, and Adia vacillated on whether or not to teach him proper technique. The answer was not now. He motioned for Adia to come closer. She gave an exaggerated glance around the corridor and snuck close to Wyl. She crouched onto one knee, putting herself closer to head level.

“What do we do now?” She asked in a whisper.

[Wyl Staedtler]

Wyl's face was alive with an excited tension, the glee radiating from his eyes only eclipsed by the caution that also crouched there. By some generous turn of the Force, Adia had become an asset to this mission and from the looks of things, this wasn't her first trip down Infiltration Lane. That didn't mean that he could let his guard down, however. There were still an untold number of things that could go wrong.

"Now we make sure the target zone is cleared of all threats," Wyl answered in a hushed tone. "Get ready to run, okay?"

His eyes traveled meaningfully from the woman's face to the door. There were no noises escaping from the other side, which lent support to the gathered intel: that Loki was currently teaching a 'saber technique class and would be occupied for at least an hour.

(Wyl knew this, of course, because he was meant to be in said class; let it never be said that truancy didn't have it's merits.)

When depressing the comm button elicited no response, the boy raised a knotted hand and gave the mechanical barrier a solid pounding. He scarcely dared to breathe until a full minute passed with no response.

"Excellent!" Wyl cackled. He held out his knuckles to Adia triumphantly. "Fistbump! All we gotta do now is override the locking mechanism and we're golden!"

[Adia Issoris]

Adia gently rapped fists with Wyl, and smiled whimsically. He looked to Adia, who dramatically pretended to keep watch.

"Ready when you are." Wyl nearly dove head first into the bag of Morgan's tools and emerged with a multi-tip screwdriver. Sensibly, he pulled each tip until he found one that fit. He joyfully set to work, removing all of the door mechanism's screws, including some that didn't need to be removed.

"How would Morgan do this..." he muttered as he looked at all the wires. He stopped, sighed, and then bounced back to the tool back with wire cutters.

"Wyl, here." Adia removed herself from her "casual" stance against the hall wall. She unclipped a small light from her belt, and shone it into the door switch.

"See, this wire goes from the open switch, and this one goes from the locking mechanism. If you connect the lock to the door switch, and then press the button, it will open." Adia explained, and Wyl looked up at her with a new admiration. While what they were doing was wrong, Adia wanted to know exactly what Wyl thought was so important to break into someone else's room. Also, Loki was so tightly wound that it might end up being very humorous.

[Wyl Staedtler]

Genes were strange, strange things. Adia hadn't been responsible for Morgan's upbringing and yet the two of them were so much alike it was sometimes unsettling. The similarities weren't even limited to biological features, a fact which Wyl found at once both eery and reassuring; if Morgan had inherited his mechanical aptitude from a mother who hadn't raised him, maybe Wyl possessed more of his own father's abilities than he had previously hoped.

Watching keenly, the boy nodded at Adia's explanation. It made sense in that concrete way that he liked, one logical sequence following another. There was a surety in the acts of building and dismantling, a confidence that didn't linger in other avenues of life.

"So the lock fuse... to the... door fuse," Wyl repeated, face creased in concentration as his small fingers carefully followed the given instructions, "and then..."

The door slid open with a muted hiss and he laughed. Wyl clapped Adia's knee and launched forward, unconcerned about leaving evidence of their intrusion in the corridor for the time being.

"Come on!" he urged, rocketing into the hushed sanctum of his arch-nemesis. There was something strange in the air, a stillness that didn't exist throughout the rest of the ship, almost as though Loki's stark personality had leeched into the atmosphere of his quarters and was now closing in with heavy disapproval. Wyl scowled and waved his hands through the air, clearing a space for his thoughts.

"Now," the boy mused, tapping his chin, "if I were a lightsaber being held hostage, where would I be?"

[Adia Issoris]

Adia's eyes went wide. There was still a bag of tools, and the door controls needed to be put back together. She worked quickly. Adia replaced whatever tools Wyl had left discarded in his search back into the bag. She put the bag into the middle of the doorway, in case the door closed, and put the door controls back together. It would pass casual inspection, anyway.

She slipped inside, and pulled the tools in with her. The door closed behind her. Wyl looked up from his saber-location contemplation.

"Somewhere locked." Adia suggested. So Wyl was looking for a lightsaber.

"Who's lightsaber is it?" She asked. If it was Loki's, this entire fiasco would be put to an immediate halt.

[Wyl Staedtler]

Like a jolt of electricity lancing across a stagnant pool, Wyl straightened with a crackling efficiency. His face pinched into a dark scowl, his youthful features shadowed in malignant ire.

"It's mine," he growled protectively. The boy's hands clenched in front of him, becoming claw-like in the radiation of the phantom pain that came from being separated from his beloved inheritance.

Wyl took a few deep, angry breaths and tried to calm his racing heart.

"He took it from me," Wyl explained. "Well, actually, Inyos gave it to him to keep safe, except Inyos doesn't understand that he's evil. He's never going to give it to me, ever, just because me and Tak took his, which was just a game not for real, and it's really, really, really important that I get it back because it was my dad's. My real life dad's."

[Adia Issoris]

Adia gave Wyl a cold glance. The fiery young man cared deeply about this shred of his father. Understandably so. Jedi were forbid to marry, except in specific circumstance. Love was expressly forbidden. It made for bad decisions. Not that there were many Jedi left to carry those rules out. There had been tens of thousands at the height of the Republic, not so now.

"You're going to violate our operational security." She hissed at him. She almost jabbed a finger in his face, but that never worked well. Wyl didn't realize it, but he was almost yelling.

"When you're on a mission, you need to be in control of your voice, and your emotions." Wyl's face scrunched up, but he knew Adia was right.

"Right." he said, and immediately went back to looking for his inheritance. Water under the bridge. If only it was that simple with almost everyone else. No one's quarters on the Whaladon were much more than a bed and a fresher with a space for clothes. The Jedi needed something bigger than this cargo hauler.

Adia pulled on a pair of thin black gloves out of habit.

"He's very neat, so be careful that things are exactly as they were before we got here." Adia instructed.

[Wyl Staedtler]

As embarrassing as it was being scolded like some green rookie, the chastisement had been needed. Wyl was a senior G.R.O.S.S operative and a Jedi-in-training, but that didn't mean he was immune to the tumultuous power of emotions; sometimes even he got caught in the clattering whirlwind of feelings - especially when they were directly tied to something of such great personal importance.

Adia seemed willing enough to put his slip in protocol behind them and so Wyl easily shouldered away the remainder of his irritation and focused on the task at hand.

"He's too neat," Wyl corrected, his tone warring between incredulity and disgust. There wasn't so much as a dust mote out of place in Loki's quarters. "It's highly irregular. I'm gonna check under the bed."

The boy dropped to his belly without further word and wriggled beneath the modest cot. There was nothing underneath except dark, cozy space and he felt his anxiety unfurl a little in the shadows, reach out it's feather hands to grasp at the empty corners. One thing was becoming very clear: the lightsaber was not here.

Wyl sighed and scooted forward until his head poked out. "He must have it on his person," he said. "It looks like we're gonna have to take a hostage, Adia. You know, to send him a message."

[Adia Issoris]

She continued her search despite Wyl's conclusion. Loki was not likely to leave it lying around casually, and yet, there were no lock boxes or safes. She frowned, and arrived at the same conclusion: the saber was on Loki's person.

"Does that mean you're a terrorist now?" She said. Adia was fully aware the Rebellion took hostages, but it troubled her that Wyl was thinking of it. He'd probably seen too many spy holos.

"We can talk about this on the way there." Adia said, her voice firm. She needed to take control of this situation so it arrived at a compromise.

[Wyl Staedtler]

Wyl pulled a face, which quickly stretched into an expression of patience. Adia clearly didn't understand how these things worked.

"He's got somethin' valuable of mine," Wyl said, "so it's only fair that I take something of his. An equal exchange of personal items isn't being a terrorist, Adia, that's just fair. Also, not letting a straight-flyin' bossy boots ruin my life is important. You don't have to sign the note if it bothers you."

Smiling cheerily, Wyl shimmied the rest of the way out from under the bed and began to rifle through the foot locker at the end of the cot. He methodically removed the left boot from a perfectly polished pair and tucked it under his arm, then added the pressed robe that was neatly folded beside them for good measure.

"It figures Loki'd only have practical stuff in here," Wyl groused. He glanced around at the bare walls and lonely ceiling. "Maybe I should make him some ships to hang up so this place doesn't look like such a morgue. That way there's something cool to take next time."

[Adia Issoris]

Adia held a hand up to her face and took a deep breath. If Wyl wanted to take a boot and a robe, well. It was a boot and a robe, she reasoned. It was bloody awful reasoning.

"Wyl... can we talk for a moment?" Adia was really at a loss of what to do with the boy. She needed more information and needed it fast. She also didn't want to alienate him. She frowned a little, not bothering with a poker face. Adia sat on the bed.

"Please, sit." She gave the space beside her a pat.

[Wyl Staedtler]

Oh no. Wyl knew exactly what that meant when a woman said it. Good things were never born of "let's talk".

With all the caution of a man being led to the gallows, the boy hopped up onto the bed beside Adia.

"Is this about feelings?" he asked, nose crinkling. "Because if it is, I'm really, really sorry. Actually, let's just go with that: m'wrong and m'sorry."

Play it safe, Staedtler, play it safe.

[Adia Issoris]

"It's not about feelings Wyl." She waved Wyl's comments away like they were gnats.

"How come Inyos gave your father's saber to Loki and not someone else?" Adia asked, coming to the heart of the matter. If it was just happenstance, the best thing would be for the saber to end up in the hands of someone that Wyl trusted, and not Loki, who Wyl had an adversarial relationship with. It was, put mildly, an ocean of misunderstanding. Wyl was a free spirit and Loki was the most hidebound person Adia had met.

[Wyl Staedtler]

Wasn't that a question for the ages? Wyl was tempted for a moment to supply an answer which called into question Inyos' sanity - an understandable conclusion to draw, considering that no man with a level head would have chosen the young Jedi as a trustee to such a treasured inheritance - but he dismissed the words almost immediately. They were mean and unfair to Inyos.

"I dunno," Wyl offered instead. He shrugged his shoulders sharply. "I guess because he knows him and thinks he can trust him to keep it safe."

The 'he doesn't trust me' went unsaid, but it was clearly infused into the little apprentice's tone, his voice bruised at the edges.

[Adia Issoris]

"I have a plan." Adia announced.

"But first, you need to put those back." She gestured at the robes and boot. It would be a funny prank to keep the boot. Loki's consternation would be legendary when he was missing his perfectly polished piece of footware.

"Actually, keep the boot." She gave Wyl a wink.

[Wyl Staedtler]

"What kind of plan?" Wyl chirped, his trademark grin spilling across his face and lighting up his eyes. He loved plans. Plans meant forward motion, they meant progress, they meant adventure and victory.

The robe was discarded easily enough; to add to the smug accomplishment of having violated the privacy of his nemesis, Wyl shook out it's beautifully pressed creases before he tossed it back into the footlocker and closed the lid.

He hefted the boot under one arm and looked to Adia eagerly.

"Are we going to pull a double-blind?" he prodded, diving hungrily for more information. "One time, on Galactic Prison Tales, um, this inmate from Corellia pretended to be stealing another inmate's datapad from the mobile library but really he was only using that to distract him from the fact that he was actually lacing his stims with nerve toxins!"

[Adia Issoris]

"It's complicated." Adia admitted. It was, if only because of the vast gulf between two of the parties involved. First thing to do would be to get Daria on board, who Wyl was much more amenable to. Morgan wasn't around, so he was out. That would have vastly simplified matters, although Morgan was decidedly unorthodox as Jedi went. Adia immediately ruled herself out because of the unpredictable schedule she endured. Daria, the boy's master, was the first and best choice, Adia decided.

She realized the whole trick would be Loki.

"Let's put that boot somewhere safe. We have work to do."