SPECIAL APPLICATION: Star Wars - Luke Skywalker [AU]
This application has been ACCEPTED.
AU (Alternate Universe) Character Application
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Joysweeper
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Juhani, Keladry of Mindelan (Mindelan), Janine Farehouse (Above)
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Luke Skywalker
SERIES: Star Wars, Star Wars Expanded Universe
RESERVED: Yes
WISHLIST: Surprisingly, no.
PERSONALITY: “I’m not leaving you. We’ll get out of this together.”
Luke’s been written by so many authors with different ideas that I could write nearly anything in this section. This is my interpretation.
In many ways, he takes after his mother. There’s a deceptive softness to him. He believes in the worthiness of self-sacrifice, puts others before himself, is empathic, and disregards personal desires for what is right. Luke also tries to see both sides of every argument, is humble, and believes that there’s good in nearly everyone.
He’s almost preternaturally calm and serene even in a crisis, though he can move very fast if he must. It’s extremely difficult to throw him, though it can happen. He can sleep easily even in very stressful times. All the same, he feels more alive when there’s trouble, which worries him. Luke makes the effort to be reactive. He’s much more observant than he seems.
His temper is controlled. Feeling even irritation surprises him a little, and makes him evaluate the reason for this feeling. He’s very aware of his emotional state and keeps it carefully regulated. Not getting angry has gotten easier over time. Even when he does get angry - he's less nice, but he's controlled.
Luke will put his life on the line for nearly anyone, and verbally defend nearly anyone, if they haven’t just been attacking. And he will forgive anything, if the offender is sincere. He does eventually recognize if someone is beyond redemption, and when he forgives someone he doesn’t simply absolve someone of all guilt, but he does try to help them. He’s actually somewhat less forgiving and more wary than he used to be, but there’s still a lot there.
For most of his life, Luke has taught, and he’s become good at it. But he’s very softhanded about discipline, even to the point of being slow to see the need for it; he’s afraid of being too harsh. He's no longer military. If he has to break his word in order to do the right thing, he won't even hesitate.
He has been everywhere, met all kinds of people, and seen a disproportionately massive sampling about what the galaxy has to offer. Luke’s more than cosmopolitan.
There’s a sort of heaviness to him - responsibility and old sorrow which are linked and never far from his thoughts, a degree of reserve. He knows the consequences should he fall again, and is very deliberately self-censuring. Luke’s got a slight inclination towards depression and something of an old soul. He doubts himself and wonders what his role should be, especially if he’s at his most Light Side. Put him in a Force-negating ysalamiri field and he seems more energetic and optimistic.
There are two parts to his staying Light. One is never getting angry or letting himself draw on/enjoy anyone’s pain. The other is respecting and caring for just about everyone; remembering that individuals are important and he can’t do everything. His dream touches on the first; the second is something he’s struggled with before. Thanks to things related to the second, he’s reluctant to casually use most Alter powers, besides mild telekinesis.
He has come around to the point of view that sometimes you must let people struggle through things alone. If he can ask for permission to do something to someone, he will. Amnesia may swing him around to being more casual about powers, and less touched with self-doubt.
Between his reluctance to use great powers, his calm, and his conscious efforts to be passive and let the Force guide him when there is no plan, he can sometimes turn out to be ineffectual and out of touch. This worries him too - how can he find the balance between interfering and caring too much and too little?
TIMELINE: Star Wars Legacy, 135 years after the events of A New Hope. By which point he’s dead and appearing as an apparition in the Force.
With ES’s rules about spirits and such, he’s getting a body which seems to have an indeterminate age. Which was true for most of his life; the Force slows aging and stretches lifespans. At first glance he seems youngish, but the closer someone looks the more signs of age become visible. He’s got the artificial right hand he had for the longest stretch in canon - basically the same model as Vader’s hand, though modified. It’s covered in synthetic skin which has false fingernails, and it’s somewhat larger and bulkier than his real hand, though still deft. Also, his left leg is slightly lamed. If he’s exhausted he favors it, and if either leg gives out, it will be that one.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND: Augh… Okay. This is not an in-depth history. Things will be skimmed over to an absurd extent. Luke Skywalker is in nearly every fragment of the EU which was set after his birth. I will not mention every single time he’s been out with Rogue Squadron, every Rebel mission, every Jedi mishap, etc. And it’s still long.
AU-ness starts with the New Jedi Order. From there on, it’s a shade less dark and depressing than canon, though it follows the same general events. Also, it specifies his death; canon hasn’t said how or when he died yet.
He was also in a fragment before his birth - Zayne Carrick, Vader, Luke, and Cade Skywalker all appeared in a vision four thousand years before any of this.
Luke’s father was Anakin Skywalker, a Jedi who was converted to the Sith by the Emperor, became Darth Vader, then helped with a genocide of the Jedi; his mother, Padme Amidala, was a politician who died soon after his fall. Luke and his twin sister Leia were born at the start of the purge, as the Republic became the Empire.
Two surviving Jedi Masters separated them, sending Leia to Alderaan. Luke went with Obi-Wan Kenobi, who took him to live on Tatooine with his father’s stepbrother’s family - Owen and Beru Lars. For the first few years Obi-Wan involved himself closely in Luke’s upbringing, but in time Owen barred the Jedi Master from the moisture farm. Luke first used the Force when he was six years old, finding a lost tool. Owen thought he’d put it there and scolded Luke harshly enough that the kid didn’t repeat the trick.
As a child Luke was endlessly curious about his origins; his aunt and uncle had wanted him to consider them his parents, but Obi-Wan had encouraged him otherwise. At age ten, when he couldn’t get answers, he ran away and got lost in a sandstorm. He encountered a tall, dark figure, and then a boy of his own age with very similar interests, Annie. Luke killed a krayt dragon with a well-thrown gaffi stick, and it and Annie vanished by the time Luke’s rescuers arrived. Luke was sure that it was more than a dream.
Growing up, his friends were the kids of other local moisture farmers. They were a rambunctious bunch, but also relatively harmless. Most were happy enough at the prospect of staying on Tatooine, but two older kids, Tank and Biggs, shared his longing to leave the planet and become a fighter pilot. He and Biggs once tried to illicitly get offworld together. When he was fourteen, he and Windy were flying through Beggar’s Canyon when their craft crashed. Obi-Wan saved them, and after this Luke started running into the Jedi Master more frequently. There were various other incidents, saving and being saved by his circle, racing, becoming increasingly skilled at flying a skyhopper and hitting two-meter-long rats from a long range without a targeting computer. Luke was an adventure-seeker, craving excitement, and developed some mechanical skills.
Biggs and Tank both left by the time Luke was eighteen. His relationship with the others in the group wasn’t as close, and he was lonely and frustrated. There was more friction between the stolid Larses and Luke, who was a dutiful boy but openly yearned for more. He did whine a little, and wanted more out of life, but he didn’t shirk his responsibilities. The Larses just wanted to keep him safe.
When he was nineteen, there came the events of A New Hope. Biggs visited and left again, Threepio and Artoo were purchased, Luke tracked Artoo and found Obi-Wan, the Larses were killed, he went to Anchorhead and met Chewie and Han Solo, they went to the Death Star and lost Obi-Wan but took Leia, they went to Yavin, Luke met Biggs again, Biggs and nearly every other pilot except Wedge Antilles died, Han came back, Luke destroyed the Death Star.
With his old life gone, he threw himself whole-souled into the Rebellion, sublimating grief into the cause just as his sister was doing. Within two weeks he had investigated three potential Rebel base locations, travelled across the galaxy, helped out in X-Wing acquisition, and helped take out a Star Destroyer.
Frankly, his early days in the Rebellion were exceedingly tumultuous and it would take a long time to describe it all. I will note the exceptional parts.
Luke was given the rank of Commander. He and Wedge, the two survivors of Red Squadron, formed Rogue Squadron, but Luke couldn’t stay with them full time and was often off leading other groups or working alone or with Han and/or Leia, leaving Wedge in his place - and honestly, Wedge was better at it. Six months after the Battle of Yavin - hence abbreviated as ABY - there was an incident investigating pirate activities in which he had to work with some stormtrooper deserters. Obi-Wan’s spirit manifested to help him, and the whole thing put a little crack in his young black-and-white view of the world.
He found a likely base location on Hoth and reported it, and was promoted to Lieutenant Commander. He talked a surviving clone trooper into joining. Luke also ran into his friend Tank, now Imperial, and this nearly led to the destruction of the Rebel fleet. He had a confrontation with an ancient Jedi driven mad by a talisman containing an even older Sith spirit, and though he and Leia escaped, it was at the cost of every other member of their company, who were mutated into hideous rakghouls. War and incidents like that blunted Luke’s initial idealism, though it wasn’t crushed.
2ABY saw Luke and Leia going together to Mimban, where they retrieved the Kaiburr Crystal for a Force-Sensitive older woman. This crystal’s shards gave a little boost to the holder’s Force ability; the entire thing magnified that ability a thousandfold. Vader also wanted the crystal. While in its proximity, Obi-Wan possessed Luke in order to fight him off. Afterward, Luke learned healing, including the healing coma. He also found that the crystal was powerless offworld, and used a shard of it to augment his father’s lightsaber.
In 3ABY, Luke regrouped with Rogue Squadron at Hoth. The events of ESB happened; he was nearly killed from wampa and hypothermia, Obi-Wan told him to go to Dagobah, Han saved him and Leia kissed him, he fought in the battle of Hoth and left for Dagobah rather than heading to the rendezvous point, he trained under Yoda and had difficulties with it, he left prematurely after having a vision of what was happening to his friends, he dueled Vader, had the famous revelation, and lost his hand. Hanging beneath Cloud City, he telepathically called out for Leia, who saved him.
If he’d been anyone else, going AWOL at such a critical time would have ended poorly for him. But he was Luke Skywalker, essential both symbolically and actually, so this was let go. He’d always been an oddity in the Rebellion, and this cinched it - he started to be regarded as a little other, part of them but not answering to the same rules.
Luke was given a prosthetic replacement hand; it was covered in synthflesh and didn’t appear artificial. Then he was shunted around on various missions. One of them saw him sent as part of a diplomatic effort to try and bring a borderline planet over into the Rebel Alliance. He was imprisoned, then broken out by defecting Imperials. Another mission had him become very ill. A third had him take out a new superweapon, the Tarkin, and flee from Vader.
Working with Rogue Squadron, Luke fell in love with a pilot named Shira Brie. In a nasty dogfight his targeting computer was knocked offline, so he used the Force - and shot her down, apparently killing her. Investigations proved that she was an Imperial agent and a traitor.
Getting word that Boba Fett had Han Solo (in carbonite, remember) and was on a particular planet, Luke took the Rogues as cover for the Falcon’s pilots and their guide Dash Rendar, who buggered out and ruined the trap. One of the Rogues had a renegade astromech that took over its X-Wing and tried to shoot Luke down, and Luke surgically disabled it without killing the pilot or destroying the droid, since he wanted it looked at. It turned out to have been sabotaged.
Luke then left the Rogues and went back to Tatooine, where he built a new lightsaber at Obi-Wan’s place and was saved by Dash Rendar from thugs; Dash had been hired to protect him. They went to meet a Bothan spymaster and helped the Bothans steal intel; Dash got some killed and then buggered out again to sulk. The Bothan base was attacked, and although most of them got away with the intel, Luke was captured when he refused to leave one who was dying. He learned how to severely mindtrick guards and escaped. Luke then regrouped with Chewie and Lando and found out that an underlord, Prince Xizor, had been behind the assassination attempts and now had Leia on Coruscant.
They infiltrated, met up with Dash Rendar (…again…), and got Leia. Luke fought Xizor’s human replica droid, Guri, discovering superspeed in order to do it. Rather than kill her, he gave her the chance to flee and reevaluate things. Luke and company then escaped, with the help of Rogue Squadron and the interference of the Imperial fleet (who were gunning for Xizor…It’s complicated). Dash Rendar appeared to die. (He did not. Instead, he let them think he died, because that’s Dash.) Soon he found out that Han Solo had been delivered to Jabba the Hutt back on Tatooine, and went there. Then came the events of RotJ.
An attempt to save Han landed Luke in a pit with Jabba’s rancor. Luke killed it, so he and the rest of the party were taken to the Sarlaac. Leia killed Jabba, they got out of there, and Luke finally went back to Dagobah. Yoda died, Luke talked to Obi-Wan and found out who Leia was, then left to go to Endor and try to take out the second Death Star’s shield generator. He used his powers to strike the fear of Threepio into Ewoks, getting them on their side. Then Luke left and let himself be captured by Vader, who he hoped to turn back to the Light Side. He was taken to the Emperor and outfought his father until cutting off his hand and realizing that they were alike. Luke declared he was a Jedi, like his father before him; the Emperor tried to kill him with lightning and was killed by Vader, who died soon after. He escaped before Wedge and Lando blew the Death Star up and cremated his father’s body during the celebration, and was cheered to see the spirits of his Masters and his Father.
The next day, Luke rushed into orbit to save Wedge, who was preventing a messenger drone from self-destructing. The message was from an outpost world, Bakura, requesting Imperial help. A truce between Rebel and Imperial forces was declared until the alien enemy was defeated. The Imperials betrayed Luke and had him turned over to the alien enemy with several burrowing parasitic worms in his lungs. He used his talk-to-anything power to get the worms to leave, and befriended a Force-Sensitive human being used by the aliens, escaping with him, though the human soon died.
Luke and Rogue Squadron went to Corellia for a bit of R&R and were caught in some action, proving that even without the Emperor, the Empire wasn’t dead yet. Wedge acquitted himself extremely well, and Luke officially left the squadron to him, for good, so he could focus on Jedi things.
Luke then entered into another massively busy period, going on mission after mission. He helped a resistance movement overthrow a king, trained his Jedi skills, went on missions to talk planets into sending representatives to the Rebel Alliance, met dozens of young people who wanted Jedi training and turned them all down, because he was afraid to give it, afraid they’d turn to the dark side. He fell in love repeatedly, gathered a whole host of companions, and came to regret not training any of the hopefuls he'd met when one became Dark Lord of the Sith under a more powerful Sith woman named Lumiya. He redeemed that student and decided to try training another, Kiro.
Luke got caught up in a series of wars between the Nagai and the Tof and soon found that one side was secretly being aided by Lumiya, who he fought, got captured by, was rescued by Kiro from, and fought again more successfully after building a second, shorter lightsaber called a shoto. He found that Lumiya was Shira Brie, the pilot he’d been in love with and fired upon. She’d been taken up by Vader, and had three damaged limbs replaced by cybernetics. She escaped them and Kiro was apparently killed.
Luke and a fleet fought on the side which Lumiya wasn’t on. He found that Kiro had survived but no longer wanted to become a Jedi. The war was ended after Luke captured an important leader. Lumiya vanished.
Luke rescued a Jedi kid from a hidden city and soon after helped the New Republic, as the Rebellion had started to call itself, capture a Star Destroyer. This finally led to him being officially promoted to General. Luke worried that New Republic forces treated him with too much respect due to his Jedi heritage, and was dismayed by the holothrillers written about some version of him who was an unalloyed hero.
The Empire was defiant, but at the time it was also somewhat fragmentary. In 5 ABY, one year after the Emperor’s death, there was word of a new Sith Lord, Shadowspawn, with his own great army. Luke led New Republic forces against them. When his ship crashed, Luke allowed himself to be captured and taken to Shadowspawn, intending to duel him - but instead of killing him, as expected, he disabled the man, finding that he was a Force-Sensitive older man named Nick Rostu who was being controlled by the real bad guy, Cronal. Nick told Luke to kill him. Luke saved Nick, was captured again, and then was forced to experience a mental eternity of the Dark, an interpretation of the Dark Side of the Force which was highly entropic.
He was able to get out with Nick’s help, but for some time after this he was heavily affected by the Dark. He also decided to act exactly like he would have before seeing the Dark and “learning the truth”, because even a heavily nihilistic Luke can’t stop trying to save people, and because he hoped that if he pretended long enough, he could fall back into the beautiful dream. (He did. Or else the lingering effects of the Dark wore off when he realized that he was a white hole. …It’s complicated)
In time, Luke used his talk-to-anything powers on rock-based molten creatures and turned Cronal’s forces to serve him. Luke freed a Darksider from Cronal’s control and used his connection to get back to Cronal. He then severed Cronal’s connection to all of his forces, which took Cronal out of the picture and killed all of them. Luke stayed to feel each one of them die, something like fifty thousand people at that point. When it was over he resigned his commission and hired someone to build an indictment against him, but was dismayed to find that the man had instead created a holothriller script for it.
After that, he spent three years traveling the galaxy looking for traces of the Jedi. He was called by a Jedi Master’s spirit to destroy an artifact. He helped the New Republic take Coruscant from the Empire, though he only had a minor role in that. One of the Rogues turned out to be Force-Sensitive, and Luke offered formal training - something he’d never done before. The offer was turned down. Luke accepted this gracefully, but it probably affected his decision to turn down the request of another, less strongly Force-Sensitive pilot. Luke would not become anyone’s master, but while hunting Jedi traces he did give a handful of lessons and plenty of advice to those he thought could use it.
In 8 ABY, four years after Endor, he went to Dathomir and, when his ship crashed, discovered self levitation/gliding with the Force. He found the ruins of an ancient Jedi ship and was captured by a tribe of Dathomiri witches, women who developed Force-Sensitivity and who took men as sex slaves. …Luke ended up one of these men. However, he befriended his captors and ended up facing off against a Dark Side-aligned tribe of witches. They almost killed him, but he was saved by his healing coma power.
A year later, in 9 ABY, he heard from the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi for the last time; his teacher moved on. The Empire resurged as Grand Admiral Thrawn returned from the Outer Rim, and several attempts were made to capture Luke and the pregnant Leia. At one point, narrowly escaping, Luke was stranded in his X-Wing. Of course he was found, by the information broker Talon Karrde and his second in command, Mara Jade.
Mara Jade was Force-Sensitive and trained as one of the Emperor’s Hands. She hated Luke for ruining her career and life, and the Emperor’s final command to her had been to kill him. All the same, she respected her boss enough that when he didn’t want Luke killed then and there or just turned over to the Empire, she went with his orders.
Luke was taken to Karrde’s base on Myrkr while Karrde decided what to do with him. When Grand Admiral Thrawn unexpectedly showed up, Karrde had Luke moved to a storage shed. Luke broke out, fled, and was pursued by Mara Jade into the forest. Nowhere on Myrkr could he touch the Force, because native animals called ysalamiri pushed it back. When Mara caught up to him, Luke was just barely able to convince her not to kill him. She reluctantly worked with him to get out of the forest and past the Stormtroopers that had been set up for them. He was let go.
Luke was made aware of rumors of a Jedi Master on Jomark. When he got there he trained under the mad Jedi Master Joruus C’baoth. C’baoth had philosophies that Luke seriously disagreed with, but he stayed, wanting to help the old man. When Mara Jade showed up, she came with the knowledge that C’baoth was with the Empire. She disabled C’baoth, but Luke would not allow her to kill a helpless enemy.
He went with Mara and saved Talon Karrde from captivity on Thrawn’s ship. Karrde agreed to tell the New Republic council about the location of a fleet which could make a serious difference in the course of the war. Said council was reluctant, so Luke took Rogue Squadron and some others out to the site. It was a trap; Imperials attacked and it was only through a very fortunate sequence of events that our heroes came out on top. Turns out Thrawn had already removed most of those ships - and most of the attackers had been freshly-decanted clones. Luke also took the time to find Mara where she’d been floating disabled in the void and get her to Coruscant’s medical facilities.
Luke and Mara developed a working relationship; despite repeated opportunities, she did not kill him, and in fact the two worked together very well. He sprung her out of jail and trusted her to lead a small band to Wayland, where the cloning facilities were. They found Joruus C’baoth there and confronted him, revealing that he too was a clone. Luke had to fight his own clone, Luuke, grown from the hand he’d lost at Cloud City and armed with his father’s lightsaber. Ultimately it was Mara Jade who killed both Luuke and C’baoth, completing her last command. Luke gave her his father’s lightsaber.
Imperials retook Coruscant and Luke went to it. He was scooped up by a raging Force storm which sent him to Byss, where he met the Emperor Reborn. Palpatine had survived by going from one rapidly degenerating clone body to the next, and now overwhelmed Luke, who agreed to become his apprentice. Luke thought he could sabotage the cause from within, and at first he tried. But he did fall to the Dark Side, quite genuinely, and eagerly anticipated those Dark Side teachings that his master was willing to dole out. Like his father before him, he planned to kill Palpatine. But not yet.
Palpatine replaced his humanlike artificial one with a mechno-hand like his father’s, which was much more mechanical-looking. He did not have this re-replaced with another humanlike one later, but he did have it covered in synthskin.
Leia and Han arrived on Byss to try to rescue him. He helped capture them. However, Leia’s influence and love for him eventually sparked partial redemption, so he helped them escape with Artoo, who had some important codes and plans on him. Luke stayed behind to try to kill off Palpatine’s clones right after the Emperor’s last body died. Palps transferred to one before he could destroy it and brought Luke to heel. This was a standard Sith thing to do, so Luke was not killed for it and continued to train, falling again. He did some terrible things.
Some time later, the Emperor took Luke with him to a base where Leia was. There, Luke abandoned the Dark Side for good and fought Palpatine sincerely, this time defeating him. But while Luke had turned, the Dark Side was not entirely gone from his psyche. For years after this he would be showier, a little more arrogant.
New Republic leadership did not feel comfortable with him, so he left them to try to train new Jedi to bring against Palpatine. Palps went after Leia and Han’s newborn son Anakin, so Luke took his Jedilings and tried to stop him. Several trainees died, but Palpatine’s spirit was finally killed for real.
In 11 ABY, having had a taste of training several Jedi at once, and convinced of the need to rebuild the Order, Luke declared himself a Jedi Master and talked the New Republic into giving him Yavin IV, the moon from ANH, to put a Jedi Academy on. He then recruited a variety of apprentices; some of them people he had worked with and given tips to before, some people he had never met.
Luke didn’t stay on his Yavin Praxeum all the time. He went to Kessel with Lando Calrissian and retrieved the Falcon, then met Qwi Xux, a defecting Imperial scientist who had been essential in the design of a number of superweapons, and the troubled and overwhelmingly Force-Sensitive youth Kyp Durron. Han and Chewie had convinced them to steal the latest and greatest superweapon, the Sun Crusher, which they sank into the heart of the gas giant Yavin.
There was a quick detour where a Dark Jedi captured him and was killed by one of Luke’s former students, whom Luke considered to be a Jedi Knight already. Luke promoted this student to Jedi Master, but X2 declined the chance to teach at the Academy, preferring one-on-one instruction.
At the Academy, Luke’s star student Gantoris suddenly produced a lightsaber and attacked Luke; Luke fended him off easily and let it go. Then Gantoris was found burned to death. Luke put Corran, a Rogue training to find his wife, on the case and was immediately distracted by new students, including Mara Jade, though she didn’t stay. Then Kyp came to train, immediately becoming the new star pupil.
Kyp was influenced by the same thing which had instructed and then killed Gantoris: Exar Kun, a Sith spirit four thousand years old. Kun wanted to kill Luke; Kyp separated his spirit and body instead and fled, stealing the Sun Crusher and using it on some inhabited star systems. Kun made some other efforts to kill Luke. The only people Luke could communicate with at all were his niece and nephew, Jaina and Jacen. A combination of Luke’s spirit, the efforts of the apprentices, and the spirit of Kun’s own long-dead master were able to finally vanquish Exar Kun.
Kyp came back to Luke, who let him back into the Jedi Academy. His punishment was that he would serve as a Jedi, forever. Nobody was happy with this. Corran left the Academy in protest. In a few months Luke went after him to help; he easily fought off five Jensaarai, Sith-influenced offshoot Jedi. He accompanied Corran in breaking people out of an Imperial prison, including Corran’s wife, and then confronted the leader of the Jensaarai. With Corran’s help, Luke turned that entire offshoot Order into allies.
A year later, in 12 ABY, Luke and a couple of students were caught by surprise and taken to an old superweapon. Luke fended off brainwashing, had his left leg horribly mangled, and met Callista, a Jedi who had transferred her spirit into part of the superweapon. They destroyed it, but only after those two students sacrificed themselves. One gave her body to Callista, but in inhabiting it she lost her ability to touch the Force. Luke took her across the galaxy hoping to help her. They discovered on Dagobah that she could still touch the Dark Side, but that didn’t help. Callista left him; he heard from her again after averting a plague and the parted formally.
In 14 ABY one of his students was murdered by an ex-student who’d joined a cultish splinter of the Empire. With the help of more students and Rogue Squadron, he thwarted that student, and for two years that cult was his major problem. The leader of the cult had summoned a transdimensional entity which wanted to eat young Jedi. Luke stopped them. Luke took a team of almost fifty Jedi to Korriban to take out the cult for good.
Luke had a personal crisis and decided to become a hermit. He used the Force to rebuild a fortress and cut himself off from contact with other people. Someone found him anyway - Akanah of the Fallanassi, an extremely pacifistic sect of Force-Sensitives. She told him that his mother had been her teacher, and he went with her on a long series of pointless journeys trying to find her before learning that she’d been lying. He did learn some of their talents. Then he decided that a hermit’s life didn’t work for him.
Luke felt the shock of a world being destroyed in 17 ABY, and found that it was connected to a pair of ex-students, Brakiss and Dolph. He went to Brakiss’s homeworld, was attacked by acidic balloon monsters, and popped them with heat redirection. Brakiss’s mother tended to his wounds and told him where to find her son. He found Brakiss, outfought him, and was told to stay out of it. When he went to see Dolph, he was burned and thrown into a pit to be eaten by a creature; Luke talked to it with the Force and instead used it to break out. When he fought Dolph he found himself getting angry and chose to die rather than dip into the Dark Side, but Leia just shot Dolph.
Lando recruited Luke to help him find a wife. Then Luke got a report from an intelligence agent, borrowed a fleet, and took it to the Corellian system, where he used his powers to get a party through the increasingly lethal insides of Centerpoint Station. He met Mara Jade and defended against a fleet until the bigger New Republic fleet arrived to squash the insurrection.
While fighting pirates, Luke suddenly feared that the profligate use of the Force he’d been going with for years might be a bad thing and cut down on it. He realized that the pirates were clones; while investigating he was trapped and saved by Mara Jade. Soon he went to a remote planet after her, and together with the help of small batlike natives they infiltrated Thrawn’s fortress and kept its occupants from throwing in with the Imperial Remnant. They also accidentally killed an “unborn” clone of Thrawn and merged with each other in the Force. With his terrible romantic history, Luke had resigned himself to bachelorhood. Mara changed this.
They were married - a private ceremony in the Jedi academy, then a public one on Coruscant, in 19 ABY. The Empire had made peace with the New Republic, but a team of Imps still tried to infiltrate and do something; Luke’s friends negated their efforts and Luke talked the ringleader around, inviting him to join the party.
A year later, he and Mara went along with a Chiss ship to the site where a Jedi mission ship had been shot down by Thrawn. Events here are ridiculously complicated, but suffice to say that Luke handled his doubts about whether Jedi should marry, helped Mara settle her doubts about allegiance, and was disturbed to find that thanks to Jorus C’baoth, the survivors hated and feared Jedi.
Over the next five years the main issue was Brakiss taking up with a dissident Imperial faction and trying to subvert Jedi apprentices, especially Luke’s niece and nephew. He was killed, though, and the faction faded away.
In 25 ABY, the Yuuzhan Vong came in from another galaxy; they never took over everything, but they did establish a presence and became a persistent nuisance, in places a real threat. Luke worried that the Jedi were not unified enough, and perhaps not trained enough, to repel them outright.
Mara gave birth to their son, who they named Ben. Because the Vong seemed very interested in capturing Jedi, they sent him and the other Jedi children to a safehouse. Luke and Mara teamed up with the more militaristic Jedi factions and led them in a string of victories. Then, because we can’t have nice things, Luke’s nephew Anakin was apparently killed, Luke’s other nephew Jacen was captured, and Coruscant fell.
He and Mara joined General Antilles’s fleet and based themselves on a strategically important world, Borleias, also founding Twin Suns Squadron. Luke gave Twin Suns to his niece Jaina and went with Mara and the Wraiths to infiltrate Coruscant, where they killed a mutated cyborg Dark Jedi and loads of Vong Then they exfiltrated to help Wedge with Operation Emperor’s Spear, which was wildly successful.
Luke decided to reform the proper Jedi Council, this time with politics, and pulled strings so a pro-Jedi candidate, Cal Omas, became Chief of State. Luke then joined General Garm Bel Iblis in striking at the Vong, using a form of Battle Meditation on their forces. However, without his parents nearby and with the feedback from a galaxy at war, his son Ben cut himself off from the Force, something neither Luke nor Mara knew how to handle.
The New Republic merged with the Imperial Remnant and several others to become the Galactic Alliance, got the help of Thrawn’s people, and found the wandering sentient planet Zonoma Sekot, origin of the Vong, which they convinced to help them out. Luke, Mara, and others went to Coruscant and confronted the Vong leadership. He used serious Oneness to kill his opponents, and in 30 ABY a treaty was signed that put down the Vong and had them live on Zonoma Sekot.
Luke telepathically contacted all Jedi and told them that the Order needed to change, to completely embrace and serve the Force. He started a new Jedi Academy on Ossus, and there were five years of relative peace, or at least no new massive crises. There was a schism in the order. Luke was able to keep things from going too far, but the fault remained.
There came the Swarm Wars, when hivemind insect people proved able to take over Jedi and make them into Joiners, part of the hivemind. Luke’s nephew Anakin, and some other Jedi thought to be lost to the Vong, were among them, helping the insects expand their territory; they were able to convert a number of people who they had been close to. Those Jedi who didn’t become Joiners had trouble deciding on courses of action. Eventually it was discovered that various Dark Jedi had also joined the hivemind and were influencing it, completely unbeknownst to the other Joiners.
When the Swarm Wars were resolved, the Joiner Jedi were parted from the insects until the Joiner connection evaporated. Anakin and the others thought lost had been changed by the near-fatal injuries, being “rebuilt” by the insects, and years in the hivemind. They were… off, and had trouble reintegrating.
Around 38 ABY, Luke’s nephew Jacen fell under the influences of Lumiya, who’d been lurking around for decades. Within two years, he became Darth Caedus, led the Alliance, and helped engineer a galactic crisis in which the Corellian system tried to secede from the Alliance. Luke was very reluctant to recognize his nephew’s fall and act on it, though he managed to retrieve his son Ben from Caedus’s tutelage. Eventually, Caedus killed Anakin.
Luke did not quite go to the Dark Side, but he came close when he killed Lumiya, who destroyed his mechanical hand. Realizing how close he’d come, he became profoundly depressed, only coming out of it to support the resistance and Jaina. He was on a third side - not Corellia, not the Alliance - and flew with Wedge's spiffy new squadron, the Rakehells. Eventually, Jaina killed her brother, and the crises was resolved.
The whole mess led to massive anti-Jedi sentiment, and the election of a Jedi-hating Chief of State. In 43 ABY Luke was arrested for dereliction of duty and was able to go free only if he accepted exile from Coruscant. Luke, Mara, and Ben started to try to determine how Jacen fell by traveling about and learning from some of the people he had learned from, picking up the various powers he had learned. Jedi started to go mad - including Mara. It was caused by an eldritch abomination, Abeloth.
Reluctantly, they allied with a lost Sith tribe whose apprentices were also being driven mad by Abeloth, who turned out to have eaten Callista and took her shape. The Sith, predictably, betrayed Luke and Ben, who nonetheless persevered in the end. Abeloth's final death ended the madness for most Jedi.
Luke couldn't help but participate in all of the successive crises, but his role in them shrank as his students' roles grew. These crises weren't so bad, or at least didn't involve the entire galaxy anyway.
Eventually Luke died. We’ll say that it was around 60 ABY when it happened, and it involved a relative going to the Dark Side as well as clones of a deceased Force-Sensitive. He allowed himself to be killed and become one with the Force, but retained his individuality. It was largely because of him that that Dark Side relative turned back to the Light. In successive years he manifested for many relatives and former apprentices, mostly to give them advise.
By 137 ABY he manifested most often to a whiny and obnoxious descendant, Cade, who was fooling around with bounty hunting and piracy instead of living up to his responsibilities to the galaxy. Cade flirted with the Dark Side a lot and blew off his famous ancestor’s talk of duty; still, it seemed there was a goldheart in there, very deep down. Eventually, he seemed to be seeking Luke’s approval.
ABILITIES:
“This isn’t my best trick.”
Okay, the “normal” things first. Luke is a pilot. An exceptional one - though it should be noted that without the Force he’s only pretty good. With it, he’s astounding. He is an amazing duelist, having studied and mastered several combat styles which add to his natural skill. Luke’s not as stunning with other weapons or unarmed, but he’s no pushover either.
Of course, he’s more than competent at basic survival skills in the wild, so on. He can read lips. He’s got some not inconsiderable mechanical skills, which really shine in emergencies, and he’s especially good with lightsabers. His prosthetic hand is immune to radiation, has a somewhat stronger grip than is standard, and can be taken apart so its components can be used for other things. He can scream like a krayt dragon.
But you’re here to read about his abilities in the Force. Two things.
The first is that Luke is one of the most powerful Force-Sensitives of all time. His father was the Chosen One, with outstanding potential that he never really lived up to, but did pass to his children. Basically, any Force ability that can be taught or picked up through study, Luke can learn alarmingly fast. And there have been a lot of those, and he has studied most of them over many years. The second is that he’s had a long list of writers, many of whom gave him new powers as the plot demanded. I'm open to more of these being locked, though I will insist on some.
Of course he’s got all of the standard things inherent to Force-Sensitives trained or not: Danger sense, “luck”, “finding”, telepathy, unnaturally fast reaction times, empathy. All are made stronger by training, and they’re incorporated into the trained abilities. Not a skill, but also: flashburns, which happen when something is so emotionally painful that a Force-Sensitive shuts down the related memories.
There are three basic categories to trained abilities in the Force, though you have to keep in mind that they are not spells or explicit powers, and they are much more intermingled than this would suggest.
First is Control, the starting point, the ability to control one’s own body, though it can be applied to others. Part of it is physical disciplines, different meditations and exercises.
Specific things falling under Control include breath control, detoxifying poisons (self and others), ignoring limits like stamina, healing, superspeed, enhancing strength, wildly enhancing short-term memory, putting themselves or others into comas, absorbing energy (including making blaster bolts and lightsaber blades nonlethal), not being hit by lightning, keeping warm in a cold environment, and keeping cool in a warm one (Luke is good enough at this to walk across lava).
Second is Sense, making the Force into a sixth sense and broadening the scope of Control.
Specifics here include enhancing or diminishing physical senses, using the Force to “see” in the dark/through obstacles/while blinded, danger sense, a sense of the currents and state of the Force (empathy is related), telepathy, melding and working as one with other Force-Sensitives, combat precognition, and mild psychometry (touch an object, know the presence of the one who used it).
He feels someone’s presence, or “sense”, and reads it like a second face. It reflects their emotional state, if they’ve had an idea, etc, and it lets him know if they’re nearby. People can obscure their sense just like they can lie with their faces, though it’s more difficult. Unfamiliar people, especially of unfamiliar species, are harder to read; with time it gets easier.
Someone truly evil/steeped in the Dark Side may show in their sense. Though they can obscure who they are, he feels if they’re near. It feels like a tornado appearing on a sunny day, a cold draft in a warm room, a loved one dying.
Third, the flashy one most people think of, is Alter. This is where most of them tend to get lumped.
Specifics? Telekinesis, creating an astral projection which can be seen and heard and can manipulate things via telekinesis, destroying droids, lightning (there is a Light Side version), creating blinding flashes of light (one of which glitches out droid vision and cameras, temporarily), self-levitation, the Mind Trick family, suppressing someone else’s Force abilities, Malacia (making someone ill and incapacitated without causing any lasting damage), creating a bubble of protection, refreshing/revitalizing someone, and concealing his Force-presence.
Expanding on the Mind Trick family: This is actually a massive range of mental powers lumped into a single heading.
First is communication/telepathy. All Jedi have communicatory powers, though non-Force-Sensitive minds and really alien ones are much harder. If he makes the effort, Luke can understand and be understood by anything he has ever tried to speak with ever. Sentient, non sentient, microbes, whatever. The communication is limited to “I am/this is not food” in the simplest life forms, but in conjunction with the other Mind Trick powers he can tame monsters, if they’re not already set on attack. With unfamiliar languages it’s also far from precise, and it’s useless for recordings or, say, radio. He can speak long-range with someone he’s already contacted.
The gentlest persuade power is the “not the droids you’re looking for” one. It works best on the “weak minded”, the distracted, and/or the drugged. But “weak minded” actually depends on circumstance. It’s easier to Mind Trick someone into paying you extra for a job you’ve done than it is to tell them to give you all their money for nothing. Putting more energy into it can get them to do more, but it’s also more likely to alert them.
Luke can also make people think he looks different or have them notice things which aren’t there, he can calm someone’s emotions, and he can suppress idle curiosity. There are darker-tinged powers which he’s very reluctant to use - causing confusion, reading minds, stealing information from them, destroying memories.
He can “infuse love into the heart of an opponent”. When he is sincere and makes the effort to communicate that he believes in someone and will not harm them, they do not doubt it. However, someone can know he’s sincere while also thinking that he’s deluded.
Concentration. The example most people would be familiar with is how Luke fired proton torpedoes into the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port. It’s incredible precision. If he wants to throw a dart between the blades of a moving fan, he can. It’s related to “luck”, but he does have to make more of an effort.
If Luke is fighting a major opponent and has no darker emotions present in his psyche, he can enter a state of partial Oneness with the Force. This is, though, only possible when he is totally calm and his connection to the Force is entirely uninterrupted. Sith know how to keep him from Oneness. Oneness is also enough of a rush that it has him moving more sluggishly after he’s done, and he’s got to sleep for about twenty hours.
If he is killed, Luke’s physical body vanishes almost instantly, leaving his clothes and artificial hand. He survives as a Force Apparition, one with the Force but keeping his identity. As an apparition he can make people see him, move things with telekinesis, use various powers, and possess someone if they are willing, but he restricts himself to advice if possible, and not a lot of that. Free will again. In a few days he’ll “move on” and fade away. He won’t be able to describe it well at all, and on being reborn he’ll be able to remember very little about being an Apparition.
Dark Side Powers: He is unlikely to ever use these. If he gets an evil twin….
Dark Side lightning is more painful than Light Side lightning; the latter is uncomfortable and incapacitating while it’s flowing, but doesn’t do nearly as much damage. He can’t cast it from his mechanical hand.
Nasty Applications Of Telekinesis like Choke, Crush, and destroying a major artery to the brain. Fun things like torture without leaving any physical signs. Putting “pressure” on someone, which isn’t too bad at first but ramps up into severe paranoia and delusions. Bolts of hatred, destructive blasts, a touch that withers flesh. Draining someone so they are exhausted and he’s not.
Finally, if he dies on the Dark Side he explodes in a massive and highly destructive column of blue lightning/fire.
Locked Powers:
The ability to recover memories which have been obliterated, lost, or just forgotten. Obviously not something that would happen in ES, but I’d like it to be more complicated than just not working. When a Jedi flashburns, they forget something in order to protect themselves. If he tries to recover something flashburned, he “pokes them in a gaping psychic wound”. This hurts and immediately rouses fight-or-flight; he feels that pain and gets thrown back by their mental defenses. He might be able to take someone through a memory they’d previously received, though.
Setting things on fire, making things explode, keeping them from exploding. The “blood trail” power. Teleporting things. Battle Meditation. Weaponizing his voice; the krayt dragon scream is merely loud, echoey, and sounds like it’s made by a huge predator.
Visions of the future are chaotic, random slivers of futures and possible futures, without context. Mind, Luke might have, say, a bad feeling about something that will happen soon, but he won’t know what it is or how it’ll affect people. His actual precognition would be limited, nothing farther ahead than thirty seconds at the most.
The various spontaneous knowledge powers. Visions of the past and the Force telling him where something he’s looking for is, someone’s name, etc. Seeing and hearing things which aren’t happening anywhere near him, and Flow-walking. However, he’s keeping psychometry, finding, the sense of pain or disaster happening somewhere, and the sense of unhappy things happening to people he knows well.
The really trippy fights. He has one in “Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor”, where he sees all lives as stars, his extraordinarily powerful enemy as a black hole, Luke defeats said enemy by becoming a white hole, and in the real world this renders the enemy into constituent atoms. There’s mention that the space scene isn’t what’s happening at all, but it’s the closest his mind can come to understanding. Going Beyond Shadows.
Weather manipulation. A powerful Jedi focusing the right way can cause serious phenomena with minor effort. Luke could telekinetically make the effort to keep rain and so on from hitting him, and change the temperature very locally - say, within a few feet, with heat redirection - but not this power itself.
Several Dark Side powers an evil twin might otherwise have - creating hyperspace wormholes, Mind Tricking on a vast scale, causing radical mutations in people and animals, killing someone by looking into their eyes, dismantling minds, “memory rubs”.
Oneness at its most powerful. …Basically, becoming utterly one with the Force without dying. Invincible and omniscient. Takes the “Jedi Messiah” thing too far.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Ben
BIRTHDAY LOG: Not this time, thanks.
DREAM:
Luke was back at the start, standing on a homestead in the old, familiar desert. The burning suns were setting, and the evening breeze blew scorched sand and heat into his face, drying him like clay in a kiln.
And here was the feeling he’d felt at the start, just like he remembered. Watching the suns set and knowing there were worlds, a galaxy beyond here. Longing for it, blind to how much pain and heartbreak came with the future. Only knowing that he wanted to leave, but he had to stay, he was tied back by his duty. It was the start.
But this wasn’t really the start, was it? It was a dream. Luke let his eyes drift from the suns and allowed himself a little nostalgia. Those had been simpler times.
Things hadn’t really been better then. He’d been so young and foolish, and he had made so many thoughtless mistakes. When he looked back with clear eyes, it was astonishing to see how much he had struggled with a sense of entitlement, with a temper.
Letting go of anger, and resentment, and anything of the sort was easier, now. It was barely even an effort anymore. Something he could do for the rest of his life.
Which was good, because it was something he had to do for the rest of his life. Luke buried the toe of his boot in scalding, coarse-grained sands and let his breath out slowly, accepting and releasing that old, lingering resentment. This was how it was. This was how it had to be.
-Wait. He was breathing, blinking, feeling the baking heat of the desert, the blistering light of the suns, his toes in his boots. Should those sensations feel as novel as they did?
Someone called his name. He turned and smiled to see his mentor’s spirit.
“Hello, Ben. It’s been a long time.”
“It has indeed.” Obi-Wan seemed close, but his voice came as if from a distance. “And I’m afraid it will be longer until next time. I’ve come to say good-bye.”
The world seemed to tremble, the twin suns flickering. Something about this. Hadn’t it happened before?
“No, I’m not a dream,” Obi-Wan said gravely. “But the distances separating us have become too great for me to appear to you in any other way. Now, even this last path is being closed to me.”
He couldn’t feel his mentor’s sense. Ridiculous. Obi-Wan was standing right there - and yet his sense wasn’t.
Instead of what he wanted to say, Luke found himself protesting, “No. You can’t leave us, Ben. We need you.”
His mentor raised his eyebrows, a hint of his old smile tugging at his lips. “You don’t need me. You are a ____, strong in the Force.” The smile faded. Obi-Wan seemed more distant for a moment, focusing on something only he could sense. Quietly, he said, “At any rate, the decision is not mine to make. I have lingered too long already, and can no longer postpone my journey from this life to what lies beyond.”
Luke felt a wash of deep regret, and Obi-Wan reminded him, mildly, “It is the pattern of all life to move on. You, too, will face this same journey one day.” He was distant again, for longer this time before he came back. “You are strong in the Force, and with perseverance and discipline you will grow stronger still.”
A hardness came to Obi-Wan’s face. “But you must never relax your guard. The enemy is gone, but the dark side is still powerful. Never forget that.”
- strange. He should have said something different there. Nothing as vague as ‘the enemy’. Luke bowed his head and said only, “I won’t.”
The hardness left. Obi-Wan smiled at him, sadly, fondly. “You will yet face great dangers. But you will also find new allies, at times and places where you expect them least.”
“New allies? Who are they?” Even as Luke said it, the strangeness of this came over him again. This had happened before, a very long time ago, and he knew who Obi-Wan meant.
Should have known. The only thing that came to him now was green eyes - intensity - trust . And that was terribly wrong. He should remember so much more than that.
Whoever those eyes belonged to meant far too much to him to be just an impression.
Obi-Wan seemed not to hear, or sense the sudden turmoil in Luke’s mind. The vision of him wavered and faded. “And now, farewell. I loved you as a son, and a student, and a friend. Until we meet again, may the Force be with you.”
“Ben-!”
The image turned, and faded, and Luke remembered that his teacher was gone. He had thought, with such a sense of loss, Then I am alone. I am the last.
Faintly, indistinctly enough that Luke barely knew he wasn’t imagining it, came Obi-Wan’s voice, one last time. “Not the last of the old. The first of the new.” It faded out with the last word.
Now he really was alone.
He closed his eyes against the setting suns, feeling an old regret and rising dismay. The first time he’d heard this conversation, it had been in a dream like this, but the talk itself had been real. This time, it was remembered. It had happened a long time ago.
Besides that, he was alone, and that wasn’t right. Ben and the one with green eyes - he should be with them. And others - so many others he somehow couldn’t remember. Something had changed. Instead he stood here and breathed. Alone.
It was familiar in the same way the desert was familiar - something he’d taken for granted once, and left behind a long time ago. Something very significant had changed. He felt a shade of fear - what could have caused this? - making the hairs on the back of his neck rise. The bizarre physical sensation of it almost masked the rising loneliness.
He acknowledged those feelings, and accepted them, and let the fear flow away. Some of the loneliness remained, but he could work with it. Whatever happened next, he needed to have a clear mind.
Time to wake up.
He opened his eyes.
JOURNAL SAMPLE: Hello there. My teacher’s name is Ben. I don’t think he’d mind my borrowing it.
I have a hand that should be waterproof, but it looks like some of the fluid in that pod got into it. I might have to take the skin off to get it out. I don’t suppose any prosthetics technicians are reading this?
Strange place.
ASPIRATIONS: Oh, so many. I tend to gravitate towards characters who are (relatively; Wedge is mildly well-known) obscure and have fairly low-key powers. Which I like, but part of me rebels. And of all the very famous characters with incredible powers, there is no one I love more than Luke Skywalker.
I don’t actually intend to give him all of the powers listed above. But some. I want to play at least a little bodyshock; he’s been dead for a long time. Similarly, he uses a different calendar than Earth-type characters.
There would inevitably be some degree of muncest with Juhani, but due to his Force-impression - it’s kind of dark-stained - and his vaguely Canderous-like voice she’d want to avoid him. He would respect that unless he saw enough of a need to track her down - though with her camouflage ability, she’d be good at evading him anyway.
I want someone who would go for the medic and scavenger jobs. I want him to use his mechanical/teaching expertise and build a lightsaber - but attached by a cable to a belt battery, because at least at first he wouldn’t find a better small power cell. I want a Jedi who’d test his connection to the Force in various ways.
I want to kill him and give him the dream of the Dark from Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, which made him all nihilistic and desperately unhappy and would do so again. I want him to die again later and dream a refutation of the Dark.
Someday I want him to come back with a partial hearing loss; say of the ability to hear speech. But this is purely because he can read lips, and that fascinates me.
AU (Alternate Universe) Character Application
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Joysweeper
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Juhani, Keladry of Mindelan (Mindelan), Janine Farehouse (Above)
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Luke Skywalker
SERIES: Star Wars, Star Wars Expanded Universe
RESERVED: Yes
WISHLIST: Surprisingly, no.
PERSONALITY: “I’m not leaving you. We’ll get out of this together.”
Luke’s been written by so many authors with different ideas that I could write nearly anything in this section. This is my interpretation.
In many ways, he takes after his mother. There’s a deceptive softness to him. He believes in the worthiness of self-sacrifice, puts others before himself, is empathic, and disregards personal desires for what is right. Luke also tries to see both sides of every argument, is humble, and believes that there’s good in nearly everyone.
He’s almost preternaturally calm and serene even in a crisis, though he can move very fast if he must. It’s extremely difficult to throw him, though it can happen. He can sleep easily even in very stressful times. All the same, he feels more alive when there’s trouble, which worries him. Luke makes the effort to be reactive. He’s much more observant than he seems.
His temper is controlled. Feeling even irritation surprises him a little, and makes him evaluate the reason for this feeling. He’s very aware of his emotional state and keeps it carefully regulated. Not getting angry has gotten easier over time. Even when he does get angry - he's less nice, but he's controlled.
Luke will put his life on the line for nearly anyone, and verbally defend nearly anyone, if they haven’t just been attacking. And he will forgive anything, if the offender is sincere. He does eventually recognize if someone is beyond redemption, and when he forgives someone he doesn’t simply absolve someone of all guilt, but he does try to help them. He’s actually somewhat less forgiving and more wary than he used to be, but there’s still a lot there.
For most of his life, Luke has taught, and he’s become good at it. But he’s very softhanded about discipline, even to the point of being slow to see the need for it; he’s afraid of being too harsh. He's no longer military. If he has to break his word in order to do the right thing, he won't even hesitate.
He has been everywhere, met all kinds of people, and seen a disproportionately massive sampling about what the galaxy has to offer. Luke’s more than cosmopolitan.
There’s a sort of heaviness to him - responsibility and old sorrow which are linked and never far from his thoughts, a degree of reserve. He knows the consequences should he fall again, and is very deliberately self-censuring. Luke’s got a slight inclination towards depression and something of an old soul. He doubts himself and wonders what his role should be, especially if he’s at his most Light Side. Put him in a Force-negating ysalamiri field and he seems more energetic and optimistic.
There are two parts to his staying Light. One is never getting angry or letting himself draw on/enjoy anyone’s pain. The other is respecting and caring for just about everyone; remembering that individuals are important and he can’t do everything. His dream touches on the first; the second is something he’s struggled with before. Thanks to things related to the second, he’s reluctant to casually use most Alter powers, besides mild telekinesis.
He has come around to the point of view that sometimes you must let people struggle through things alone. If he can ask for permission to do something to someone, he will. Amnesia may swing him around to being more casual about powers, and less touched with self-doubt.
Between his reluctance to use great powers, his calm, and his conscious efforts to be passive and let the Force guide him when there is no plan, he can sometimes turn out to be ineffectual and out of touch. This worries him too - how can he find the balance between interfering and caring too much and too little?
TIMELINE: Star Wars Legacy, 135 years after the events of A New Hope. By which point he’s dead and appearing as an apparition in the Force.
With ES’s rules about spirits and such, he’s getting a body which seems to have an indeterminate age. Which was true for most of his life; the Force slows aging and stretches lifespans. At first glance he seems youngish, but the closer someone looks the more signs of age become visible. He’s got the artificial right hand he had for the longest stretch in canon - basically the same model as Vader’s hand, though modified. It’s covered in synthetic skin which has false fingernails, and it’s somewhat larger and bulkier than his real hand, though still deft. Also, his left leg is slightly lamed. If he’s exhausted he favors it, and if either leg gives out, it will be that one.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND: Augh… Okay. This is not an in-depth history. Things will be skimmed over to an absurd extent. Luke Skywalker is in nearly every fragment of the EU which was set after his birth. I will not mention every single time he’s been out with Rogue Squadron, every Rebel mission, every Jedi mishap, etc. And it’s still long.
AU-ness starts with the New Jedi Order. From there on, it’s a shade less dark and depressing than canon, though it follows the same general events. Also, it specifies his death; canon hasn’t said how or when he died yet.
He was also in a fragment before his birth - Zayne Carrick, Vader, Luke, and Cade Skywalker all appeared in a vision four thousand years before any of this.
Luke’s father was Anakin Skywalker, a Jedi who was converted to the Sith by the Emperor, became Darth Vader, then helped with a genocide of the Jedi; his mother, Padme Amidala, was a politician who died soon after his fall. Luke and his twin sister Leia were born at the start of the purge, as the Republic became the Empire.
Two surviving Jedi Masters separated them, sending Leia to Alderaan. Luke went with Obi-Wan Kenobi, who took him to live on Tatooine with his father’s stepbrother’s family - Owen and Beru Lars. For the first few years Obi-Wan involved himself closely in Luke’s upbringing, but in time Owen barred the Jedi Master from the moisture farm. Luke first used the Force when he was six years old, finding a lost tool. Owen thought he’d put it there and scolded Luke harshly enough that the kid didn’t repeat the trick.
As a child Luke was endlessly curious about his origins; his aunt and uncle had wanted him to consider them his parents, but Obi-Wan had encouraged him otherwise. At age ten, when he couldn’t get answers, he ran away and got lost in a sandstorm. He encountered a tall, dark figure, and then a boy of his own age with very similar interests, Annie. Luke killed a krayt dragon with a well-thrown gaffi stick, and it and Annie vanished by the time Luke’s rescuers arrived. Luke was sure that it was more than a dream.
Growing up, his friends were the kids of other local moisture farmers. They were a rambunctious bunch, but also relatively harmless. Most were happy enough at the prospect of staying on Tatooine, but two older kids, Tank and Biggs, shared his longing to leave the planet and become a fighter pilot. He and Biggs once tried to illicitly get offworld together. When he was fourteen, he and Windy were flying through Beggar’s Canyon when their craft crashed. Obi-Wan saved them, and after this Luke started running into the Jedi Master more frequently. There were various other incidents, saving and being saved by his circle, racing, becoming increasingly skilled at flying a skyhopper and hitting two-meter-long rats from a long range without a targeting computer. Luke was an adventure-seeker, craving excitement, and developed some mechanical skills.
Biggs and Tank both left by the time Luke was eighteen. His relationship with the others in the group wasn’t as close, and he was lonely and frustrated. There was more friction between the stolid Larses and Luke, who was a dutiful boy but openly yearned for more. He did whine a little, and wanted more out of life, but he didn’t shirk his responsibilities. The Larses just wanted to keep him safe.
When he was nineteen, there came the events of A New Hope. Biggs visited and left again, Threepio and Artoo were purchased, Luke tracked Artoo and found Obi-Wan, the Larses were killed, he went to Anchorhead and met Chewie and Han Solo, they went to the Death Star and lost Obi-Wan but took Leia, they went to Yavin, Luke met Biggs again, Biggs and nearly every other pilot except Wedge Antilles died, Han came back, Luke destroyed the Death Star.
With his old life gone, he threw himself whole-souled into the Rebellion, sublimating grief into the cause just as his sister was doing. Within two weeks he had investigated three potential Rebel base locations, travelled across the galaxy, helped out in X-Wing acquisition, and helped take out a Star Destroyer.
Frankly, his early days in the Rebellion were exceedingly tumultuous and it would take a long time to describe it all. I will note the exceptional parts.
Luke was given the rank of Commander. He and Wedge, the two survivors of Red Squadron, formed Rogue Squadron, but Luke couldn’t stay with them full time and was often off leading other groups or working alone or with Han and/or Leia, leaving Wedge in his place - and honestly, Wedge was better at it. Six months after the Battle of Yavin - hence abbreviated as ABY - there was an incident investigating pirate activities in which he had to work with some stormtrooper deserters. Obi-Wan’s spirit manifested to help him, and the whole thing put a little crack in his young black-and-white view of the world.
He found a likely base location on Hoth and reported it, and was promoted to Lieutenant Commander. He talked a surviving clone trooper into joining. Luke also ran into his friend Tank, now Imperial, and this nearly led to the destruction of the Rebel fleet. He had a confrontation with an ancient Jedi driven mad by a talisman containing an even older Sith spirit, and though he and Leia escaped, it was at the cost of every other member of their company, who were mutated into hideous rakghouls. War and incidents like that blunted Luke’s initial idealism, though it wasn’t crushed.
2ABY saw Luke and Leia going together to Mimban, where they retrieved the Kaiburr Crystal for a Force-Sensitive older woman. This crystal’s shards gave a little boost to the holder’s Force ability; the entire thing magnified that ability a thousandfold. Vader also wanted the crystal. While in its proximity, Obi-Wan possessed Luke in order to fight him off. Afterward, Luke learned healing, including the healing coma. He also found that the crystal was powerless offworld, and used a shard of it to augment his father’s lightsaber.
In 3ABY, Luke regrouped with Rogue Squadron at Hoth. The events of ESB happened; he was nearly killed from wampa and hypothermia, Obi-Wan told him to go to Dagobah, Han saved him and Leia kissed him, he fought in the battle of Hoth and left for Dagobah rather than heading to the rendezvous point, he trained under Yoda and had difficulties with it, he left prematurely after having a vision of what was happening to his friends, he dueled Vader, had the famous revelation, and lost his hand. Hanging beneath Cloud City, he telepathically called out for Leia, who saved him.
If he’d been anyone else, going AWOL at such a critical time would have ended poorly for him. But he was Luke Skywalker, essential both symbolically and actually, so this was let go. He’d always been an oddity in the Rebellion, and this cinched it - he started to be regarded as a little other, part of them but not answering to the same rules.
Luke was given a prosthetic replacement hand; it was covered in synthflesh and didn’t appear artificial. Then he was shunted around on various missions. One of them saw him sent as part of a diplomatic effort to try and bring a borderline planet over into the Rebel Alliance. He was imprisoned, then broken out by defecting Imperials. Another mission had him become very ill. A third had him take out a new superweapon, the Tarkin, and flee from Vader.
Working with Rogue Squadron, Luke fell in love with a pilot named Shira Brie. In a nasty dogfight his targeting computer was knocked offline, so he used the Force - and shot her down, apparently killing her. Investigations proved that she was an Imperial agent and a traitor.
Getting word that Boba Fett had Han Solo (in carbonite, remember) and was on a particular planet, Luke took the Rogues as cover for the Falcon’s pilots and their guide Dash Rendar, who buggered out and ruined the trap. One of the Rogues had a renegade astromech that took over its X-Wing and tried to shoot Luke down, and Luke surgically disabled it without killing the pilot or destroying the droid, since he wanted it looked at. It turned out to have been sabotaged.
Luke then left the Rogues and went back to Tatooine, where he built a new lightsaber at Obi-Wan’s place and was saved by Dash Rendar from thugs; Dash had been hired to protect him. They went to meet a Bothan spymaster and helped the Bothans steal intel; Dash got some killed and then buggered out again to sulk. The Bothan base was attacked, and although most of them got away with the intel, Luke was captured when he refused to leave one who was dying. He learned how to severely mindtrick guards and escaped. Luke then regrouped with Chewie and Lando and found out that an underlord, Prince Xizor, had been behind the assassination attempts and now had Leia on Coruscant.
They infiltrated, met up with Dash Rendar (…again…), and got Leia. Luke fought Xizor’s human replica droid, Guri, discovering superspeed in order to do it. Rather than kill her, he gave her the chance to flee and reevaluate things. Luke and company then escaped, with the help of Rogue Squadron and the interference of the Imperial fleet (who were gunning for Xizor…It’s complicated). Dash Rendar appeared to die. (He did not. Instead, he let them think he died, because that’s Dash.) Soon he found out that Han Solo had been delivered to Jabba the Hutt back on Tatooine, and went there. Then came the events of RotJ.
An attempt to save Han landed Luke in a pit with Jabba’s rancor. Luke killed it, so he and the rest of the party were taken to the Sarlaac. Leia killed Jabba, they got out of there, and Luke finally went back to Dagobah. Yoda died, Luke talked to Obi-Wan and found out who Leia was, then left to go to Endor and try to take out the second Death Star’s shield generator. He used his powers to strike the fear of Threepio into Ewoks, getting them on their side. Then Luke left and let himself be captured by Vader, who he hoped to turn back to the Light Side. He was taken to the Emperor and outfought his father until cutting off his hand and realizing that they were alike. Luke declared he was a Jedi, like his father before him; the Emperor tried to kill him with lightning and was killed by Vader, who died soon after. He escaped before Wedge and Lando blew the Death Star up and cremated his father’s body during the celebration, and was cheered to see the spirits of his Masters and his Father.
The next day, Luke rushed into orbit to save Wedge, who was preventing a messenger drone from self-destructing. The message was from an outpost world, Bakura, requesting Imperial help. A truce between Rebel and Imperial forces was declared until the alien enemy was defeated. The Imperials betrayed Luke and had him turned over to the alien enemy with several burrowing parasitic worms in his lungs. He used his talk-to-anything power to get the worms to leave, and befriended a Force-Sensitive human being used by the aliens, escaping with him, though the human soon died.
Luke and Rogue Squadron went to Corellia for a bit of R&R and were caught in some action, proving that even without the Emperor, the Empire wasn’t dead yet. Wedge acquitted himself extremely well, and Luke officially left the squadron to him, for good, so he could focus on Jedi things.
Luke then entered into another massively busy period, going on mission after mission. He helped a resistance movement overthrow a king, trained his Jedi skills, went on missions to talk planets into sending representatives to the Rebel Alliance, met dozens of young people who wanted Jedi training and turned them all down, because he was afraid to give it, afraid they’d turn to the dark side. He fell in love repeatedly, gathered a whole host of companions, and came to regret not training any of the hopefuls he'd met when one became Dark Lord of the Sith under a more powerful Sith woman named Lumiya. He redeemed that student and decided to try training another, Kiro.
Luke got caught up in a series of wars between the Nagai and the Tof and soon found that one side was secretly being aided by Lumiya, who he fought, got captured by, was rescued by Kiro from, and fought again more successfully after building a second, shorter lightsaber called a shoto. He found that Lumiya was Shira Brie, the pilot he’d been in love with and fired upon. She’d been taken up by Vader, and had three damaged limbs replaced by cybernetics. She escaped them and Kiro was apparently killed.
Luke and a fleet fought on the side which Lumiya wasn’t on. He found that Kiro had survived but no longer wanted to become a Jedi. The war was ended after Luke captured an important leader. Lumiya vanished.
Luke rescued a Jedi kid from a hidden city and soon after helped the New Republic, as the Rebellion had started to call itself, capture a Star Destroyer. This finally led to him being officially promoted to General. Luke worried that New Republic forces treated him with too much respect due to his Jedi heritage, and was dismayed by the holothrillers written about some version of him who was an unalloyed hero.
The Empire was defiant, but at the time it was also somewhat fragmentary. In 5 ABY, one year after the Emperor’s death, there was word of a new Sith Lord, Shadowspawn, with his own great army. Luke led New Republic forces against them. When his ship crashed, Luke allowed himself to be captured and taken to Shadowspawn, intending to duel him - but instead of killing him, as expected, he disabled the man, finding that he was a Force-Sensitive older man named Nick Rostu who was being controlled by the real bad guy, Cronal. Nick told Luke to kill him. Luke saved Nick, was captured again, and then was forced to experience a mental eternity of the Dark, an interpretation of the Dark Side of the Force which was highly entropic.
He was able to get out with Nick’s help, but for some time after this he was heavily affected by the Dark. He also decided to act exactly like he would have before seeing the Dark and “learning the truth”, because even a heavily nihilistic Luke can’t stop trying to save people, and because he hoped that if he pretended long enough, he could fall back into the beautiful dream. (He did. Or else the lingering effects of the Dark wore off when he realized that he was a white hole. …It’s complicated)
In time, Luke used his talk-to-anything powers on rock-based molten creatures and turned Cronal’s forces to serve him. Luke freed a Darksider from Cronal’s control and used his connection to get back to Cronal. He then severed Cronal’s connection to all of his forces, which took Cronal out of the picture and killed all of them. Luke stayed to feel each one of them die, something like fifty thousand people at that point. When it was over he resigned his commission and hired someone to build an indictment against him, but was dismayed to find that the man had instead created a holothriller script for it.
After that, he spent three years traveling the galaxy looking for traces of the Jedi. He was called by a Jedi Master’s spirit to destroy an artifact. He helped the New Republic take Coruscant from the Empire, though he only had a minor role in that. One of the Rogues turned out to be Force-Sensitive, and Luke offered formal training - something he’d never done before. The offer was turned down. Luke accepted this gracefully, but it probably affected his decision to turn down the request of another, less strongly Force-Sensitive pilot. Luke would not become anyone’s master, but while hunting Jedi traces he did give a handful of lessons and plenty of advice to those he thought could use it.
In 8 ABY, four years after Endor, he went to Dathomir and, when his ship crashed, discovered self levitation/gliding with the Force. He found the ruins of an ancient Jedi ship and was captured by a tribe of Dathomiri witches, women who developed Force-Sensitivity and who took men as sex slaves. …Luke ended up one of these men. However, he befriended his captors and ended up facing off against a Dark Side-aligned tribe of witches. They almost killed him, but he was saved by his healing coma power.
A year later, in 9 ABY, he heard from the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi for the last time; his teacher moved on. The Empire resurged as Grand Admiral Thrawn returned from the Outer Rim, and several attempts were made to capture Luke and the pregnant Leia. At one point, narrowly escaping, Luke was stranded in his X-Wing. Of course he was found, by the information broker Talon Karrde and his second in command, Mara Jade.
Mara Jade was Force-Sensitive and trained as one of the Emperor’s Hands. She hated Luke for ruining her career and life, and the Emperor’s final command to her had been to kill him. All the same, she respected her boss enough that when he didn’t want Luke killed then and there or just turned over to the Empire, she went with his orders.
Luke was taken to Karrde’s base on Myrkr while Karrde decided what to do with him. When Grand Admiral Thrawn unexpectedly showed up, Karrde had Luke moved to a storage shed. Luke broke out, fled, and was pursued by Mara Jade into the forest. Nowhere on Myrkr could he touch the Force, because native animals called ysalamiri pushed it back. When Mara caught up to him, Luke was just barely able to convince her not to kill him. She reluctantly worked with him to get out of the forest and past the Stormtroopers that had been set up for them. He was let go.
Luke was made aware of rumors of a Jedi Master on Jomark. When he got there he trained under the mad Jedi Master Joruus C’baoth. C’baoth had philosophies that Luke seriously disagreed with, but he stayed, wanting to help the old man. When Mara Jade showed up, she came with the knowledge that C’baoth was with the Empire. She disabled C’baoth, but Luke would not allow her to kill a helpless enemy.
He went with Mara and saved Talon Karrde from captivity on Thrawn’s ship. Karrde agreed to tell the New Republic council about the location of a fleet which could make a serious difference in the course of the war. Said council was reluctant, so Luke took Rogue Squadron and some others out to the site. It was a trap; Imperials attacked and it was only through a very fortunate sequence of events that our heroes came out on top. Turns out Thrawn had already removed most of those ships - and most of the attackers had been freshly-decanted clones. Luke also took the time to find Mara where she’d been floating disabled in the void and get her to Coruscant’s medical facilities.
Luke and Mara developed a working relationship; despite repeated opportunities, she did not kill him, and in fact the two worked together very well. He sprung her out of jail and trusted her to lead a small band to Wayland, where the cloning facilities were. They found Joruus C’baoth there and confronted him, revealing that he too was a clone. Luke had to fight his own clone, Luuke, grown from the hand he’d lost at Cloud City and armed with his father’s lightsaber. Ultimately it was Mara Jade who killed both Luuke and C’baoth, completing her last command. Luke gave her his father’s lightsaber.
Imperials retook Coruscant and Luke went to it. He was scooped up by a raging Force storm which sent him to Byss, where he met the Emperor Reborn. Palpatine had survived by going from one rapidly degenerating clone body to the next, and now overwhelmed Luke, who agreed to become his apprentice. Luke thought he could sabotage the cause from within, and at first he tried. But he did fall to the Dark Side, quite genuinely, and eagerly anticipated those Dark Side teachings that his master was willing to dole out. Like his father before him, he planned to kill Palpatine. But not yet.
Palpatine replaced his humanlike artificial one with a mechno-hand like his father’s, which was much more mechanical-looking. He did not have this re-replaced with another humanlike one later, but he did have it covered in synthskin.
Leia and Han arrived on Byss to try to rescue him. He helped capture them. However, Leia’s influence and love for him eventually sparked partial redemption, so he helped them escape with Artoo, who had some important codes and plans on him. Luke stayed behind to try to kill off Palpatine’s clones right after the Emperor’s last body died. Palps transferred to one before he could destroy it and brought Luke to heel. This was a standard Sith thing to do, so Luke was not killed for it and continued to train, falling again. He did some terrible things.
Some time later, the Emperor took Luke with him to a base where Leia was. There, Luke abandoned the Dark Side for good and fought Palpatine sincerely, this time defeating him. But while Luke had turned, the Dark Side was not entirely gone from his psyche. For years after this he would be showier, a little more arrogant.
New Republic leadership did not feel comfortable with him, so he left them to try to train new Jedi to bring against Palpatine. Palps went after Leia and Han’s newborn son Anakin, so Luke took his Jedilings and tried to stop him. Several trainees died, but Palpatine’s spirit was finally killed for real.
In 11 ABY, having had a taste of training several Jedi at once, and convinced of the need to rebuild the Order, Luke declared himself a Jedi Master and talked the New Republic into giving him Yavin IV, the moon from ANH, to put a Jedi Academy on. He then recruited a variety of apprentices; some of them people he had worked with and given tips to before, some people he had never met.
Luke didn’t stay on his Yavin Praxeum all the time. He went to Kessel with Lando Calrissian and retrieved the Falcon, then met Qwi Xux, a defecting Imperial scientist who had been essential in the design of a number of superweapons, and the troubled and overwhelmingly Force-Sensitive youth Kyp Durron. Han and Chewie had convinced them to steal the latest and greatest superweapon, the Sun Crusher, which they sank into the heart of the gas giant Yavin.
There was a quick detour where a Dark Jedi captured him and was killed by one of Luke’s former students, whom Luke considered to be a Jedi Knight already. Luke promoted this student to Jedi Master, but X2 declined the chance to teach at the Academy, preferring one-on-one instruction.
At the Academy, Luke’s star student Gantoris suddenly produced a lightsaber and attacked Luke; Luke fended him off easily and let it go. Then Gantoris was found burned to death. Luke put Corran, a Rogue training to find his wife, on the case and was immediately distracted by new students, including Mara Jade, though she didn’t stay. Then Kyp came to train, immediately becoming the new star pupil.
Kyp was influenced by the same thing which had instructed and then killed Gantoris: Exar Kun, a Sith spirit four thousand years old. Kun wanted to kill Luke; Kyp separated his spirit and body instead and fled, stealing the Sun Crusher and using it on some inhabited star systems. Kun made some other efforts to kill Luke. The only people Luke could communicate with at all were his niece and nephew, Jaina and Jacen. A combination of Luke’s spirit, the efforts of the apprentices, and the spirit of Kun’s own long-dead master were able to finally vanquish Exar Kun.
Kyp came back to Luke, who let him back into the Jedi Academy. His punishment was that he would serve as a Jedi, forever. Nobody was happy with this. Corran left the Academy in protest. In a few months Luke went after him to help; he easily fought off five Jensaarai, Sith-influenced offshoot Jedi. He accompanied Corran in breaking people out of an Imperial prison, including Corran’s wife, and then confronted the leader of the Jensaarai. With Corran’s help, Luke turned that entire offshoot Order into allies.
A year later, in 12 ABY, Luke and a couple of students were caught by surprise and taken to an old superweapon. Luke fended off brainwashing, had his left leg horribly mangled, and met Callista, a Jedi who had transferred her spirit into part of the superweapon. They destroyed it, but only after those two students sacrificed themselves. One gave her body to Callista, but in inhabiting it she lost her ability to touch the Force. Luke took her across the galaxy hoping to help her. They discovered on Dagobah that she could still touch the Dark Side, but that didn’t help. Callista left him; he heard from her again after averting a plague and the parted formally.
In 14 ABY one of his students was murdered by an ex-student who’d joined a cultish splinter of the Empire. With the help of more students and Rogue Squadron, he thwarted that student, and for two years that cult was his major problem. The leader of the cult had summoned a transdimensional entity which wanted to eat young Jedi. Luke stopped them. Luke took a team of almost fifty Jedi to Korriban to take out the cult for good.
Luke had a personal crisis and decided to become a hermit. He used the Force to rebuild a fortress and cut himself off from contact with other people. Someone found him anyway - Akanah of the Fallanassi, an extremely pacifistic sect of Force-Sensitives. She told him that his mother had been her teacher, and he went with her on a long series of pointless journeys trying to find her before learning that she’d been lying. He did learn some of their talents. Then he decided that a hermit’s life didn’t work for him.
Luke felt the shock of a world being destroyed in 17 ABY, and found that it was connected to a pair of ex-students, Brakiss and Dolph. He went to Brakiss’s homeworld, was attacked by acidic balloon monsters, and popped them with heat redirection. Brakiss’s mother tended to his wounds and told him where to find her son. He found Brakiss, outfought him, and was told to stay out of it. When he went to see Dolph, he was burned and thrown into a pit to be eaten by a creature; Luke talked to it with the Force and instead used it to break out. When he fought Dolph he found himself getting angry and chose to die rather than dip into the Dark Side, but Leia just shot Dolph.
Lando recruited Luke to help him find a wife. Then Luke got a report from an intelligence agent, borrowed a fleet, and took it to the Corellian system, where he used his powers to get a party through the increasingly lethal insides of Centerpoint Station. He met Mara Jade and defended against a fleet until the bigger New Republic fleet arrived to squash the insurrection.
While fighting pirates, Luke suddenly feared that the profligate use of the Force he’d been going with for years might be a bad thing and cut down on it. He realized that the pirates were clones; while investigating he was trapped and saved by Mara Jade. Soon he went to a remote planet after her, and together with the help of small batlike natives they infiltrated Thrawn’s fortress and kept its occupants from throwing in with the Imperial Remnant. They also accidentally killed an “unborn” clone of Thrawn and merged with each other in the Force. With his terrible romantic history, Luke had resigned himself to bachelorhood. Mara changed this.
They were married - a private ceremony in the Jedi academy, then a public one on Coruscant, in 19 ABY. The Empire had made peace with the New Republic, but a team of Imps still tried to infiltrate and do something; Luke’s friends negated their efforts and Luke talked the ringleader around, inviting him to join the party.
A year later, he and Mara went along with a Chiss ship to the site where a Jedi mission ship had been shot down by Thrawn. Events here are ridiculously complicated, but suffice to say that Luke handled his doubts about whether Jedi should marry, helped Mara settle her doubts about allegiance, and was disturbed to find that thanks to Jorus C’baoth, the survivors hated and feared Jedi.
Over the next five years the main issue was Brakiss taking up with a dissident Imperial faction and trying to subvert Jedi apprentices, especially Luke’s niece and nephew. He was killed, though, and the faction faded away.
In 25 ABY, the Yuuzhan Vong came in from another galaxy; they never took over everything, but they did establish a presence and became a persistent nuisance, in places a real threat. Luke worried that the Jedi were not unified enough, and perhaps not trained enough, to repel them outright.
Mara gave birth to their son, who they named Ben. Because the Vong seemed very interested in capturing Jedi, they sent him and the other Jedi children to a safehouse. Luke and Mara teamed up with the more militaristic Jedi factions and led them in a string of victories. Then, because we can’t have nice things, Luke’s nephew Anakin was apparently killed, Luke’s other nephew Jacen was captured, and Coruscant fell.
He and Mara joined General Antilles’s fleet and based themselves on a strategically important world, Borleias, also founding Twin Suns Squadron. Luke gave Twin Suns to his niece Jaina and went with Mara and the Wraiths to infiltrate Coruscant, where they killed a mutated cyborg Dark Jedi and loads of Vong Then they exfiltrated to help Wedge with Operation Emperor’s Spear, which was wildly successful.
Luke decided to reform the proper Jedi Council, this time with politics, and pulled strings so a pro-Jedi candidate, Cal Omas, became Chief of State. Luke then joined General Garm Bel Iblis in striking at the Vong, using a form of Battle Meditation on their forces. However, without his parents nearby and with the feedback from a galaxy at war, his son Ben cut himself off from the Force, something neither Luke nor Mara knew how to handle.
The New Republic merged with the Imperial Remnant and several others to become the Galactic Alliance, got the help of Thrawn’s people, and found the wandering sentient planet Zonoma Sekot, origin of the Vong, which they convinced to help them out. Luke, Mara, and others went to Coruscant and confronted the Vong leadership. He used serious Oneness to kill his opponents, and in 30 ABY a treaty was signed that put down the Vong and had them live on Zonoma Sekot.
Luke telepathically contacted all Jedi and told them that the Order needed to change, to completely embrace and serve the Force. He started a new Jedi Academy on Ossus, and there were five years of relative peace, or at least no new massive crises. There was a schism in the order. Luke was able to keep things from going too far, but the fault remained.
There came the Swarm Wars, when hivemind insect people proved able to take over Jedi and make them into Joiners, part of the hivemind. Luke’s nephew Anakin, and some other Jedi thought to be lost to the Vong, were among them, helping the insects expand their territory; they were able to convert a number of people who they had been close to. Those Jedi who didn’t become Joiners had trouble deciding on courses of action. Eventually it was discovered that various Dark Jedi had also joined the hivemind and were influencing it, completely unbeknownst to the other Joiners.
When the Swarm Wars were resolved, the Joiner Jedi were parted from the insects until the Joiner connection evaporated. Anakin and the others thought lost had been changed by the near-fatal injuries, being “rebuilt” by the insects, and years in the hivemind. They were… off, and had trouble reintegrating.
Around 38 ABY, Luke’s nephew Jacen fell under the influences of Lumiya, who’d been lurking around for decades. Within two years, he became Darth Caedus, led the Alliance, and helped engineer a galactic crisis in which the Corellian system tried to secede from the Alliance. Luke was very reluctant to recognize his nephew’s fall and act on it, though he managed to retrieve his son Ben from Caedus’s tutelage. Eventually, Caedus killed Anakin.
Luke did not quite go to the Dark Side, but he came close when he killed Lumiya, who destroyed his mechanical hand. Realizing how close he’d come, he became profoundly depressed, only coming out of it to support the resistance and Jaina. He was on a third side - not Corellia, not the Alliance - and flew with Wedge's spiffy new squadron, the Rakehells. Eventually, Jaina killed her brother, and the crises was resolved.
The whole mess led to massive anti-Jedi sentiment, and the election of a Jedi-hating Chief of State. In 43 ABY Luke was arrested for dereliction of duty and was able to go free only if he accepted exile from Coruscant. Luke, Mara, and Ben started to try to determine how Jacen fell by traveling about and learning from some of the people he had learned from, picking up the various powers he had learned. Jedi started to go mad - including Mara. It was caused by an eldritch abomination, Abeloth.
Reluctantly, they allied with a lost Sith tribe whose apprentices were also being driven mad by Abeloth, who turned out to have eaten Callista and took her shape. The Sith, predictably, betrayed Luke and Ben, who nonetheless persevered in the end. Abeloth's final death ended the madness for most Jedi.
Luke couldn't help but participate in all of the successive crises, but his role in them shrank as his students' roles grew. These crises weren't so bad, or at least didn't involve the entire galaxy anyway.
Eventually Luke died. We’ll say that it was around 60 ABY when it happened, and it involved a relative going to the Dark Side as well as clones of a deceased Force-Sensitive. He allowed himself to be killed and become one with the Force, but retained his individuality. It was largely because of him that that Dark Side relative turned back to the Light. In successive years he manifested for many relatives and former apprentices, mostly to give them advise.
By 137 ABY he manifested most often to a whiny and obnoxious descendant, Cade, who was fooling around with bounty hunting and piracy instead of living up to his responsibilities to the galaxy. Cade flirted with the Dark Side a lot and blew off his famous ancestor’s talk of duty; still, it seemed there was a goldheart in there, very deep down. Eventually, he seemed to be seeking Luke’s approval.
ABILITIES:
“This isn’t my best trick.”
Okay, the “normal” things first. Luke is a pilot. An exceptional one - though it should be noted that without the Force he’s only pretty good. With it, he’s astounding. He is an amazing duelist, having studied and mastered several combat styles which add to his natural skill. Luke’s not as stunning with other weapons or unarmed, but he’s no pushover either.
Of course, he’s more than competent at basic survival skills in the wild, so on. He can read lips. He’s got some not inconsiderable mechanical skills, which really shine in emergencies, and he’s especially good with lightsabers. His prosthetic hand is immune to radiation, has a somewhat stronger grip than is standard, and can be taken apart so its components can be used for other things. He can scream like a krayt dragon.
But you’re here to read about his abilities in the Force. Two things.
The first is that Luke is one of the most powerful Force-Sensitives of all time. His father was the Chosen One, with outstanding potential that he never really lived up to, but did pass to his children. Basically, any Force ability that can be taught or picked up through study, Luke can learn alarmingly fast. And there have been a lot of those, and he has studied most of them over many years. The second is that he’s had a long list of writers, many of whom gave him new powers as the plot demanded. I'm open to more of these being locked, though I will insist on some.
Of course he’s got all of the standard things inherent to Force-Sensitives trained or not: Danger sense, “luck”, “finding”, telepathy, unnaturally fast reaction times, empathy. All are made stronger by training, and they’re incorporated into the trained abilities. Not a skill, but also: flashburns, which happen when something is so emotionally painful that a Force-Sensitive shuts down the related memories.
There are three basic categories to trained abilities in the Force, though you have to keep in mind that they are not spells or explicit powers, and they are much more intermingled than this would suggest.
First is Control, the starting point, the ability to control one’s own body, though it can be applied to others. Part of it is physical disciplines, different meditations and exercises.
Specific things falling under Control include breath control, detoxifying poisons (self and others), ignoring limits like stamina, healing, superspeed, enhancing strength, wildly enhancing short-term memory, putting themselves or others into comas, absorbing energy (including making blaster bolts and lightsaber blades nonlethal), not being hit by lightning, keeping warm in a cold environment, and keeping cool in a warm one (Luke is good enough at this to walk across lava).
Second is Sense, making the Force into a sixth sense and broadening the scope of Control.
Specifics here include enhancing or diminishing physical senses, using the Force to “see” in the dark/through obstacles/while blinded, danger sense, a sense of the currents and state of the Force (empathy is related), telepathy, melding and working as one with other Force-Sensitives, combat precognition, and mild psychometry (touch an object, know the presence of the one who used it).
He feels someone’s presence, or “sense”, and reads it like a second face. It reflects their emotional state, if they’ve had an idea, etc, and it lets him know if they’re nearby. People can obscure their sense just like they can lie with their faces, though it’s more difficult. Unfamiliar people, especially of unfamiliar species, are harder to read; with time it gets easier.
Someone truly evil/steeped in the Dark Side may show in their sense. Though they can obscure who they are, he feels if they’re near. It feels like a tornado appearing on a sunny day, a cold draft in a warm room, a loved one dying.
Third, the flashy one most people think of, is Alter. This is where most of them tend to get lumped.
Specifics? Telekinesis, creating an astral projection which can be seen and heard and can manipulate things via telekinesis, destroying droids, lightning (there is a Light Side version), creating blinding flashes of light (one of which glitches out droid vision and cameras, temporarily), self-levitation, the Mind Trick family, suppressing someone else’s Force abilities, Malacia (making someone ill and incapacitated without causing any lasting damage), creating a bubble of protection, refreshing/revitalizing someone, and concealing his Force-presence.
Expanding on the Mind Trick family: This is actually a massive range of mental powers lumped into a single heading.
First is communication/telepathy. All Jedi have communicatory powers, though non-Force-Sensitive minds and really alien ones are much harder. If he makes the effort, Luke can understand and be understood by anything he has ever tried to speak with ever. Sentient, non sentient, microbes, whatever. The communication is limited to “I am/this is not food” in the simplest life forms, but in conjunction with the other Mind Trick powers he can tame monsters, if they’re not already set on attack. With unfamiliar languages it’s also far from precise, and it’s useless for recordings or, say, radio. He can speak long-range with someone he’s already contacted.
The gentlest persuade power is the “not the droids you’re looking for” one. It works best on the “weak minded”, the distracted, and/or the drugged. But “weak minded” actually depends on circumstance. It’s easier to Mind Trick someone into paying you extra for a job you’ve done than it is to tell them to give you all their money for nothing. Putting more energy into it can get them to do more, but it’s also more likely to alert them.
Luke can also make people think he looks different or have them notice things which aren’t there, he can calm someone’s emotions, and he can suppress idle curiosity. There are darker-tinged powers which he’s very reluctant to use - causing confusion, reading minds, stealing information from them, destroying memories.
He can “infuse love into the heart of an opponent”. When he is sincere and makes the effort to communicate that he believes in someone and will not harm them, they do not doubt it. However, someone can know he’s sincere while also thinking that he’s deluded.
Concentration. The example most people would be familiar with is how Luke fired proton torpedoes into the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port. It’s incredible precision. If he wants to throw a dart between the blades of a moving fan, he can. It’s related to “luck”, but he does have to make more of an effort.
If Luke is fighting a major opponent and has no darker emotions present in his psyche, he can enter a state of partial Oneness with the Force. This is, though, only possible when he is totally calm and his connection to the Force is entirely uninterrupted. Sith know how to keep him from Oneness. Oneness is also enough of a rush that it has him moving more sluggishly after he’s done, and he’s got to sleep for about twenty hours.
If he is killed, Luke’s physical body vanishes almost instantly, leaving his clothes and artificial hand. He survives as a Force Apparition, one with the Force but keeping his identity. As an apparition he can make people see him, move things with telekinesis, use various powers, and possess someone if they are willing, but he restricts himself to advice if possible, and not a lot of that. Free will again. In a few days he’ll “move on” and fade away. He won’t be able to describe it well at all, and on being reborn he’ll be able to remember very little about being an Apparition.
Dark Side Powers: He is unlikely to ever use these. If he gets an evil twin….
Dark Side lightning is more painful than Light Side lightning; the latter is uncomfortable and incapacitating while it’s flowing, but doesn’t do nearly as much damage. He can’t cast it from his mechanical hand.
Nasty Applications Of Telekinesis like Choke, Crush, and destroying a major artery to the brain. Fun things like torture without leaving any physical signs. Putting “pressure” on someone, which isn’t too bad at first but ramps up into severe paranoia and delusions. Bolts of hatred, destructive blasts, a touch that withers flesh. Draining someone so they are exhausted and he’s not.
Finally, if he dies on the Dark Side he explodes in a massive and highly destructive column of blue lightning/fire.
Locked Powers:
The ability to recover memories which have been obliterated, lost, or just forgotten. Obviously not something that would happen in ES, but I’d like it to be more complicated than just not working. When a Jedi flashburns, they forget something in order to protect themselves. If he tries to recover something flashburned, he “pokes them in a gaping psychic wound”. This hurts and immediately rouses fight-or-flight; he feels that pain and gets thrown back by their mental defenses. He might be able to take someone through a memory they’d previously received, though.
Setting things on fire, making things explode, keeping them from exploding. The “blood trail” power. Teleporting things. Battle Meditation. Weaponizing his voice; the krayt dragon scream is merely loud, echoey, and sounds like it’s made by a huge predator.
Visions of the future are chaotic, random slivers of futures and possible futures, without context. Mind, Luke might have, say, a bad feeling about something that will happen soon, but he won’t know what it is or how it’ll affect people. His actual precognition would be limited, nothing farther ahead than thirty seconds at the most.
The various spontaneous knowledge powers. Visions of the past and the Force telling him where something he’s looking for is, someone’s name, etc. Seeing and hearing things which aren’t happening anywhere near him, and Flow-walking. However, he’s keeping psychometry, finding, the sense of pain or disaster happening somewhere, and the sense of unhappy things happening to people he knows well.
The really trippy fights. He has one in “Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor”, where he sees all lives as stars, his extraordinarily powerful enemy as a black hole, Luke defeats said enemy by becoming a white hole, and in the real world this renders the enemy into constituent atoms. There’s mention that the space scene isn’t what’s happening at all, but it’s the closest his mind can come to understanding. Going Beyond Shadows.
Weather manipulation. A powerful Jedi focusing the right way can cause serious phenomena with minor effort. Luke could telekinetically make the effort to keep rain and so on from hitting him, and change the temperature very locally - say, within a few feet, with heat redirection - but not this power itself.
Several Dark Side powers an evil twin might otherwise have - creating hyperspace wormholes, Mind Tricking on a vast scale, causing radical mutations in people and animals, killing someone by looking into their eyes, dismantling minds, “memory rubs”.
Oneness at its most powerful. …Basically, becoming utterly one with the Force without dying. Invincible and omniscient. Takes the “Jedi Messiah” thing too far.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Ben
BIRTHDAY LOG: Not this time, thanks.
DREAM:
Luke was back at the start, standing on a homestead in the old, familiar desert. The burning suns were setting, and the evening breeze blew scorched sand and heat into his face, drying him like clay in a kiln.
And here was the feeling he’d felt at the start, just like he remembered. Watching the suns set and knowing there were worlds, a galaxy beyond here. Longing for it, blind to how much pain and heartbreak came with the future. Only knowing that he wanted to leave, but he had to stay, he was tied back by his duty. It was the start.
But this wasn’t really the start, was it? It was a dream. Luke let his eyes drift from the suns and allowed himself a little nostalgia. Those had been simpler times.
Things hadn’t really been better then. He’d been so young and foolish, and he had made so many thoughtless mistakes. When he looked back with clear eyes, it was astonishing to see how much he had struggled with a sense of entitlement, with a temper.
Letting go of anger, and resentment, and anything of the sort was easier, now. It was barely even an effort anymore. Something he could do for the rest of his life.
Which was good, because it was something he had to do for the rest of his life. Luke buried the toe of his boot in scalding, coarse-grained sands and let his breath out slowly, accepting and releasing that old, lingering resentment. This was how it was. This was how it had to be.
-Wait. He was breathing, blinking, feeling the baking heat of the desert, the blistering light of the suns, his toes in his boots. Should those sensations feel as novel as they did?
Someone called his name. He turned and smiled to see his mentor’s spirit.
“Hello, Ben. It’s been a long time.”
“It has indeed.” Obi-Wan seemed close, but his voice came as if from a distance. “And I’m afraid it will be longer until next time. I’ve come to say good-bye.”
The world seemed to tremble, the twin suns flickering. Something about this. Hadn’t it happened before?
“No, I’m not a dream,” Obi-Wan said gravely. “But the distances separating us have become too great for me to appear to you in any other way. Now, even this last path is being closed to me.”
He couldn’t feel his mentor’s sense. Ridiculous. Obi-Wan was standing right there - and yet his sense wasn’t.
Instead of what he wanted to say, Luke found himself protesting, “No. You can’t leave us, Ben. We need you.”
His mentor raised his eyebrows, a hint of his old smile tugging at his lips. “You don’t need me. You are a ____, strong in the Force.” The smile faded. Obi-Wan seemed more distant for a moment, focusing on something only he could sense. Quietly, he said, “At any rate, the decision is not mine to make. I have lingered too long already, and can no longer postpone my journey from this life to what lies beyond.”
Luke felt a wash of deep regret, and Obi-Wan reminded him, mildly, “It is the pattern of all life to move on. You, too, will face this same journey one day.” He was distant again, for longer this time before he came back. “You are strong in the Force, and with perseverance and discipline you will grow stronger still.”
A hardness came to Obi-Wan’s face. “But you must never relax your guard. The enemy is gone, but the dark side is still powerful. Never forget that.”
- strange. He should have said something different there. Nothing as vague as ‘the enemy’. Luke bowed his head and said only, “I won’t.”
The hardness left. Obi-Wan smiled at him, sadly, fondly. “You will yet face great dangers. But you will also find new allies, at times and places where you expect them least.”
“New allies? Who are they?” Even as Luke said it, the strangeness of this came over him again. This had happened before, a very long time ago, and he knew who Obi-Wan meant.
Should have known. The only thing that came to him now was green eyes - intensity - trust . And that was terribly wrong. He should remember so much more than that.
Whoever those eyes belonged to meant far too much to him to be just an impression.
Obi-Wan seemed not to hear, or sense the sudden turmoil in Luke’s mind. The vision of him wavered and faded. “And now, farewell. I loved you as a son, and a student, and a friend. Until we meet again, may the Force be with you.”
“Ben-!”
The image turned, and faded, and Luke remembered that his teacher was gone. He had thought, with such a sense of loss, Then I am alone. I am the last.
Faintly, indistinctly enough that Luke barely knew he wasn’t imagining it, came Obi-Wan’s voice, one last time. “Not the last of the old. The first of the new.” It faded out with the last word.
Now he really was alone.
He closed his eyes against the setting suns, feeling an old regret and rising dismay. The first time he’d heard this conversation, it had been in a dream like this, but the talk itself had been real. This time, it was remembered. It had happened a long time ago.
Besides that, he was alone, and that wasn’t right. Ben and the one with green eyes - he should be with them. And others - so many others he somehow couldn’t remember. Something had changed. Instead he stood here and breathed. Alone.
It was familiar in the same way the desert was familiar - something he’d taken for granted once, and left behind a long time ago. Something very significant had changed. He felt a shade of fear - what could have caused this? - making the hairs on the back of his neck rise. The bizarre physical sensation of it almost masked the rising loneliness.
He acknowledged those feelings, and accepted them, and let the fear flow away. Some of the loneliness remained, but he could work with it. Whatever happened next, he needed to have a clear mind.
Time to wake up.
He opened his eyes.
JOURNAL SAMPLE: Hello there. My teacher’s name is Ben. I don’t think he’d mind my borrowing it.
I have a hand that should be waterproof, but it looks like some of the fluid in that pod got into it. I might have to take the skin off to get it out. I don’t suppose any prosthetics technicians are reading this?
Strange place.
ASPIRATIONS: Oh, so many. I tend to gravitate towards characters who are (relatively; Wedge is mildly well-known) obscure and have fairly low-key powers. Which I like, but part of me rebels. And of all the very famous characters with incredible powers, there is no one I love more than Luke Skywalker.
I don’t actually intend to give him all of the powers listed above. But some. I want to play at least a little bodyshock; he’s been dead for a long time. Similarly, he uses a different calendar than Earth-type characters.
There would inevitably be some degree of muncest with Juhani, but due to his Force-impression - it’s kind of dark-stained - and his vaguely Canderous-like voice she’d want to avoid him. He would respect that unless he saw enough of a need to track her down - though with her camouflage ability, she’d be good at evading him anyway.
I want someone who would go for the medic and scavenger jobs. I want him to use his mechanical/teaching expertise and build a lightsaber - but attached by a cable to a belt battery, because at least at first he wouldn’t find a better small power cell. I want a Jedi who’d test his connection to the Force in various ways.
I want to kill him and give him the dream of the Dark from Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, which made him all nihilistic and desperately unhappy and would do so again. I want him to die again later and dream a refutation of the Dark.
Someday I want him to come back with a partial hearing loss; say of the ability to hear speech. But this is purely because he can read lips, and that fascinates me.