7.1
Galactic Standard Calendar
Look at the link above for information on wookieepedia about the calendar and days if you're confused
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The day you arrive on Naboo is an odd one; when the mass transport that you come in on lands, and the doors open, you're somewhat overwhelmed; never, ever has there been so much green in your eyes. After spending a few minutes walking around the Palace Square, you're tracked down by two guards, a Gungan and a human.
"Master Jedi," the human says with a bow, to Master's distaste, "we've come to see you and the young Anakin Skywalker to visit the queen."
Dooku nods politely. "Lead on, gentlemen. I'm afraid it's been many years since I was last on this planet."
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"What. Were you.
Thinking." Master's teeth are clenched and his eyes are closed.
You're confused. "What do you mean?"
You're both walking in the streets of Theed to the address of your new home. People of all walks of life mill around you, but they all seem to give Master Dooku a wide berth.
Master's voice is utterly monotone as he says, "Oh Padme, it's so good to see you! Let me give you a hug! Why are there Gungans everywhere, I thought humans and Gungans didn't get along!"
He stops you just before you open the door to the house by grabbing your shoulder. "Anakin. Do you have any idea how uncouth you looked today?"
"Padme's my friend!"
His teeth are showing, but it's not quite a smile. "I'm sure she is."
He then practically drags you inside, and seeing a table with chairs, tosses you into a seat. "Look, boy. You are my apprentice. Therefore, everything you do poorly makes
me look bad. Not only that, but you were in the Queen's Palace,
at her behest, so when you humiliate her in front of the beings that she just formed a peace treaty with, that makes
her look bad."
He leans close and looks you straight in the eye. "And the fact that
you did it makes
you look bad, more than anybody."
Cowed, you sit tightly in your seat while Master takes a seat across from you. "Should I go back and apologize, Master?"
"No, give them time to try and forget that you exist." You shrink into yourself at that. "No, here is what is going to happen: in the mornings, you will train. In the afternoons, you will sit where you are sitting now, and I will teach you how to speak without being an ignorant buffoon. Understood?"
You nod.
"Good. Your first lesson begins now. The lesson is: don't speak. Don't speak until you know exactly what to say, how to say it, and how to offend as few people as possible by what you have to say."
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Every single day, for the next five months, you wake up before the dawn breaks and train with Master for six hours, sparing a few minutes to eat what you can grab before Master gets impatient.
He never seems to eat anything, as far as you can tell, unless he's being courteous to Mom after she's cooked something for him.
Once you're done with the morning practice, you eat lunch, and he sits down with you at the dining table to teach you about whatever he feels you need to learn about that day, be it history, etiquette, droid maintenance (to which you rolled your eyes), or whatever else he thinks will be important. On one occasion, he even has you teach him some Huttese.
But in the morning, it's six hours of meditating interspersed with fighting bouts with the practice rods, with no breaks, and the change of topic can come with no warning at all, leaving you sitting with your eyes closed while Master swings a rod at you.
"Why do you keep doing this to me, Master?" For all that your voice is calm, you're glaring daggers at him as you rub the newest bruise on your arm. You swear he's aiming for the same spot every time...
"Because you need to learn how to focus on more than one thing at a time," he replies calmly. "Reach out into the Force, and through it, feel what is happening in the moment around you. Stretch out with your feelings, and in time, you will know everything around you more intimately than you know the back of your own hand."
"But I never pay attention to the back of my hand," you point out.
"Then it shouldn't take long for you to learn, should it?
Well, you can't fault that logic, even as frustrated as you are. You blink in the realization that you are quite frustrated; Master keeps telling you to keep track of your darker emotions, as they can cloud your connection to the Force.
Sinking back into your meditation, you purge your emotions and try again.
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If you weren't so calm you would be startled by the sensations the Force provides. You aren't seeing anything with your eyes, but you just… know everything around you with such clarity that even if your eyes were open, what you would see would be mere colors and textures, compared to an entirely different and more complete plane of understanding.
Sitting with your eyes closed in the training room with Master, you can sense his breath ruffling his beard as he breathes through his nose. You can sense the rhythm of his heartbeat. Focusing more intently, you can sense the movement of the blood in his veins, the expansion and contraction of his lungs and diaphragm, the marrow in his bones, the bubbling gases in his stomach and intestines, the corneas of his eyes, the fluid in his brain-
You leap backward as Master's practice rod whistles through the area you had just inhabited. For a moment, all is still as your awareness comes crashing back down. Then Master tosses the rod to the side, where it corrects its course and lands gently in the rack for storage.
"Well done, Anakin."
You look around you. Your back is against the far wall, several meters away from Master. He hadn't even touched you, and you got out of his range in a single bound.
The grin that slides onto your face can't be stopped. Purging emotions and cleaning vomit was one thing, but this - the understanding, the power, the impossible
speed - this was the
Force.
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The idea to make a pod racer in the garage was met with unanimous disapproval.
"You'll get yourself killed on one of those things!" said Mom.
"Maybe wait to build one until we're on a planet where pod racing is legal, hmm?" said Master. You have to concede to that point.
The idea to build a speeder, on the other hand, was met with cautious approval. You shake your head in wonder. They're the same things in different packages, so what's the problem with pods?
You set aside parts and tools in the garage. Unlike on Tatooine, there was no rush to see this project done within a few months, or even a few years if need be. You have time.
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One week after your disastrous first impression at the Palace, Master allows you to make an appearance there to apologize for your actions. You explain to Padme, her guards, and her advisors that you hadn't yet begun your training with Master Dooku, that you had had no experience of anything but of being a slave at that point, and you had since been educated about your wrongdoings.
They politely forgive you, but for next half year, you are always guided to the Royal Gardens or some other secluded place when you go to the palace, instead of to the Queen in her Court directly when you go to visit on Taungsdays.
It casts a pall on your meetings with Padme, but having had lessons on how to speak beaten into you by Master Dooku, you manage not to make a fool of yourself overly much. As the months go on, Padme warms up to you again and talks about more personal topics with you.
Your delight at this development cannot be understated, and Master starts to get mad at you for not concentrating on your lessons, as you've taken up a new pastime that Senator Palpatine recommended.
"Well, Anakin, when I truly want to make a good impression on someone, I spend some time earlier in the day thinking of what I know about them, and thinking about likely conversational topics. I'll think of what kinds of questions those topics will bring up, and form my responses then, instead of having to think up a reply on the spot. Between us, it also allows me to think of ways to flatter my counterpart, without coming on too strong by coming up with bad ideas in the moment. Ah… but that will be more important when you're older. Pay me no mind, my boy."
Senator Palpatine is quickly becoming one of your favorite people. Every time you see or hear from him, he has the most pertinent advice, always delivered with a friendly smile.
By putting his advice into play (and irritating Master by doing so), you see Padme start to smile at you more warmly, and confide in you more personally, than she's done since Tatooine. It takes nearly four months to get to that point, but you do get there, and when you do, you make sure to thank Senator Palpatine from the bottom of your heart.
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Your Taungsdays being occupied by training and visiting Padme, you dedicate all of your spare time on Primeday helping Mom, talking to her, and generally making sure she's happy on this new home planet of yours.
She struggles with this new life, though she tries to hide it from you. Her new arm is nowhere near as mobile as her former flesh and bone one was, and it jerks in odd ways and moves irritatingly slowly.
Increasingly, she simply doesn't wear it, as she finds no use for something so clunky.
But her real struggle on this planet isn't physical, but mental. She was born and raised as a slave to a Hutt, and you had already been born by the time she was sold to a new master. She has never lived a life without having a particular duty, or a singular purpose.
Now, whenever she isn't cooking or cleaning around the house, anyone with eyes can see that she feels lost. She wanders aimlessly around Theed, or sits at the table and fiddles with her arm, trying to make it work better. There's a spark in her eye that seems to have dimmed since you left Tatooine, and it makes you anxious. You took her from Tatooine so that she would be happy; now she's suffered extreme pain, she only has one arm, and she's utterly miserable because of your actions.
So you spend your Primedays with Mom. Sometimes talking, sometimes cooking,sometimes just sitting in silence, but you always make sure to make her smile while you're with her.
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"Hey Mom, you haven't worn your arm for a week. Can I use it for a while?"
You try to sound nonchalant, but by Mom's smile and roll of her eyes, she probably knows what you want to do. You get the arm.
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Centaxday is your day for tinkering on the droids, but this time you're not going to be taking apart Dummy or C3PO and trying to put them back together better; this time you'll be optimising Mom's arm.
As soon as you take off the plasteel shell around the mechanics, you know that you'll need better components. Frankly, C3PO's arm is higher quality, and those parts came out of a slaver's junkyard.
The next day you send a message to Padme that you won't be able to make it to your weekly meeting, and you take a speeder to the Theed General Market with Master Dooku.
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Dooku recommends just getting Mom a new arm, but that wouldn't be the same, and you can build an arm better than anything being sold anyhow. You tell him as much, but he's skeptical.
Four hours of searching high and low, and you've found what you need: a well-made motivator to process commands from the attached nerves to the machinery, four small motors for the shoulder joint, bicep, forearm, and hand, new joint hinges and gears for the elbow and shoulder, a central processor, and several ports and drives to store and process data in, along with generators and the necessities to string them all together. If course, you don't settle for anything less than the best; after all, this is for Mom.
It will be more than just a prosthetic; what you're planning is nearly as sophisticated as C3PO, but with better parts. It will be an arm, that is actually a droid; it will be able to react to what she tells it to do swiftly and with precision. It might even be better than her normal arm! Well, if you get it to work. Which you will!
Dooku, who pays for all your new gear, is not happy about paying nearly the same amount as he would for a top of the line protocol droid. "Once you're done with this project for your mother," he tells you, "you need to start selling your own creations if you want money. We don't have the financial backing of the Jedi Order, and though I have money, I won't do this for you again unless it is a necessity."
You agree to the idea, and before you leave the market, you quickly make arrangements to sell Dummy to the owner of a small diner that has a sign boldly declaring it to be 'Rijto's'. Having calibrated Dummy's spacial awareness and balance systems, the droid no longer bobs up and down and side to side, so in theory, it could walk around the eating establishment and fill up drinks with ease. That lands you 120 credits, though you'd initially tried for 150. Could be worse; the owner had wanted to pay 50, and frankly even that was more than Dummy was worth.
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When you get home, before you do anything else, you thoroughly soak Dummy in an oil bath to clean off any lingering rust, and you paint him in the colors of Rijto's sign, purple with green highlights. You spend the rest of Taungsday optimising the little droid as best you could; after all, you got quite the good deal on him,and you don't want to get the reputation of a cheat.
Your time on Tatooine taught you many valuable things, and one of these was to try and cheat your way if you could, but never, ever let on that you were cheating anyone; that's how people ended up getting fed to a sarlacc.
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Your spare time on Zhellday and Benduday was typically spent reaching out to your friends off-world. Every week, you get in touch with your best friend, Kitster Banai, and swap tales about what's happening.
Apparently, he bought
Par Ontham's Guide to Etiquette with the winnings you gave him, and he hoped to be a majordomo when he was older, to hopefully buy his way out of slavery.
It made you wish you could go back for him, but you knew that if you did, you would only be placing Kitster in danger. You freed your mom from slavery, and Kitster's master, a Hutt, would rather kill him than see him free unless he could gain something from it.
Once you're finished speaking with Kitster, you call Jar Jar again. He hasn't picked up even once, but you try every week.
Something doesn't feel right about his disappearance. He wouldn't tell you to keep in touch and then ignore you, would he? Something definitely doesn't feel right about this…
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Before bed, you meditate, hoping to get an edge for tomorrow, so that you will perform better during your spars and during your Force training with Dooku. Mom thinks it's cute that you pray before bed, but you and Dooku know it's more than that. The more you reach into the Force, the easier it is to feel it. Not only in your meditation, but you've started to feel the force when you've been working on your droids, and when you are spending time with Mom, Kitster, Padme, and Senator Palpatine.
You're making progress.
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