Glowsticks 101: Do Cats and Glowsticks Blend?

[Ilias Nytrau]

Another day, another slew of minor contusions, illnesses, and more besides. Well, night, rather... so, not so much. Though most of the camp spent the dark hours in an unconscious state, there were some that were active to a certain extent; otherwise, the ginger-maned healer was left to his own devices, just him and the relative silence until daybreak arrived and the first shift came to relieve him. He spent this time after the night watch attending to his own needs as the community began to rouse from its slumber, before tending to the needs of other Jedi in their growth. This morning, Ilias stood at a table in a common area, with a small number of cloth-swaddled cylinders of different lengths, and in one case, not entirely straight, and the tools to clean and maintain each one.

This would be the first time he so much as touched most of these hilts since over thirty years before, as he began to unwind the cloth from around the first one, a training lightsaber he had retained since his earliest days as a padawan, over half a century ago. With the cloth laid out flat, he set his eyes on this, the first of his blades, before gingerly retrieving it from the tabletop and giving it a careful visual inspection for any tampering, finding none. This blade had been last used as recently as ten years prior, in one of the last spars he had with his last student, one Maya Whitelight. There were countless memories attached to this tool of learning. Satisfied, he thumbed the ignition switch and a sharp blue blade sprung from the hilt in a telltale snap-hiss.

"I suppose I should be unsurprised," he said quietly, a small smile lending a vague curve to his lips, "that you still work, old friend."

He lead the humming blade through a few movements, long-worn into his bones, before deactivating it and setting it aside, loosely covered over in its cloth. This process was to be repeated for each hilt, until he was satisfied.

[Kazahan]

Kazahan was a large creature. Only rarely did he meet people who even came close to his size, so when he saw the human looking man standing at a table working on lightsabers, he was riveted.

Kazahan was good at sneaking. Or he could be good at sneaking when he was focused on being sneaky. Why he slinked quietly close to the man's table and peeked over the top to regard him and his lightsabers intently when he wasn't trying to be sneaky could have been partially attributed to Kazahan's inherent feline characteristics, but also it could have been that he didn't want the man to stop and take the lightsabers away as had been the normal response ever since another padawan's training saber fell apart in their hands after Kazahan had looked at it.

His head dipped past the table and poked up over another edge, closer to the older Jedi's workspace. Kazahan's eyes drifted from the lightsabers to the man and then back, but still the nearly seven foot tall felinoid said nothing.

His head dipped below the edge of the table again, and this time he stood and moved to the opposite side of the table the Jedi was working at.

"What are you doing with your lightsabers?" he asked. "This one would never take his apart. There would be a very good chance that he would be unable to put it back together."

[Ilias Nytrau]

While the felinoid padawan snuck this way and that, the half-human master maintained an air of focus and unawareness. While the focus was much deeper than mere perceptions, he was far from unaware of the presence of Kazahan. Every time the furred creature bobbed up over one edge of the table, only to disappear and reappear over another, he was given not a single mote of a reaction. Still, Ilias was watching, ever watching with his nonphysical senses, while cleaning dirt out of a groove in a curved hilt and remembering exactly where it was this dirt had come from, and how it had gotten there. It was not until the padawan spoke that he broke his gaze from the task at hand to look on the large feline, a cordial smile following suit with the raising of his pale blue eyes.

"How then do you perform repairs, young one? Certainly, the parts that go into a lightsaber are intended to last, but a lightsaber is a tool that is meant to be used. Use will eventually deplete the power cell. Wear and tear will do their worst, given enough time. "

Time: a concept that had a progressively different meaning for him than most others. He took another good look at Kazahan, noting the lack of a lightsaber at his side. It dawned on him, then, that the comment the felinoid made was entirely appropriate, in this context. He looked down at the curved hilt once again, flicking it on to spout a blade of turquoise, then extinguishing it again. Satisfied, he loosely wrapped it in the cloth it had been bound in previously, and set it aside. Only then did he look on Kazahan a second time.

"Putting a lightsaber back together again is much the same as building it in the first place. Taking it apart is a reverse of that process, but not having the experience," he said, gesturing to the hilt-less midsection of the padawan, "makes the prospect daunting."

He picked the long cylinder from the tabletop, and began to unswaddle it.

"I am Master Nytrau, young one," he said, disengaging the cloth from the dual-bladed hilt, "now what am I to call you, before this conversation gets more involved?"

[Kazahan]

"Ah yes," the Trianii bowed quickly and stood straight again. "This one is called Kazahan, Master Ng-eetraoo. Ngytroo. Naitra-oo. Nytrau."

Kazahan worked his mouth for a moment after that, mumbling the Jedi Master's name a few more times.

"Kazahan is Trianii. Which this one has learned is a felinoid species, often called cats in the wider galaxy. Kazahan has since learned there are many felinoid species. Is Master Nytrau," here Kazahan slowed down and said the man's name carefully, as it was still new to him and not quite the sounds he was used to making, "a cat also?"