“Bant Eerin of Gam Quanda, Last But Surely Not Least of the Fearsome Foursome”
Title: “Bant Eerin of Gam Quanda, Last But Surely Not Least of the Fearsome Foursome”
Pairing: None as yet.
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline PG-13, maybe (?)
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters from Star Wars, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .
Summary: This is thirty random but chronological moments from the life of Bant Eerin of Gam Quanda, one of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s three closest/oldest friends from the Jedi Temple crèche (hence, one of the “fearsome foursome” of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Garen Muln, Reeft of Clan Heron-Catcher, and Bant herself) and a Mon Calamari Jedi Master well known for her sympathetic heart, her healing touch, her calm and grace, and her unshakeable loyalty to her friends. There is an actual story here - one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together - but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )
Warning: This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Bant Eerin of Gam Quanda’s life, as she has been and is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU Star Wars series You Became to Me. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
Author’s Notes: 1). For anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is compatible with my SW AU trilogy You Became to Me, including the trilogy Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith, if you squint at a few things sideways and view a couple others solely through the lens of Bant’s eyes. 2). Although this is technically modelled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, exactly, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info and a link to the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to whatever the challenge actually is that’s associated with said LJ prompt set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Bant. 3). Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters like Bant or for original characters, for that matter, should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of EU or original characters, for example) or only mentioned in passing are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and that readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! 4). I decided to make the Mon Cal just a wee bit more, well, alien in their physiology (seeing as how they’re not near-human, being amphibious humanoids, and all), which is why Bant physically (and, to a lesser degree, mentally and emotionally) ages at a slower rate than most of her friends in the crèche. I’m going against the EU information regarding her birth date by doing this, but frankly it strikes me as improbable that all of the humanoid species would age exactly like humans and near-humans do, and frankly I figure that other such notable Mon Cal as Admiral Ackbar probably died earlier than normal, due to his extremely hard life, and would not have been overly Force-sensitive anyway, so . . . that’s why I thought that this would make more sense, especially since not a whole lot is heard about Bant once she and her friends have been Knighted (which makes more sense if one can posit that her time as a Padawan necessarily stretched quite a bit longer than, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s period of apprenticeship).
“Bant Eerin of Gam Quanda, Last But Surely Not Least of the Fearsome Foursome”
01.) Percentage: Statistically speaking, as a whole, Mon Calamari tend to have a slightly higher overall sensitivity to the Force than the majority of human norms (possibly because survival on their largely ocean-bound world, with its many different examples of sentiency all competing for sufficient space and resources to spread and thrive, has, historically, required the Mon Cal to be more naturally in tune with their surroundings than most other worlds and moons require of their human occupants); however, given the fact that surprisingly few individual Mon Calamari actually possess the depths of strength in the Force needed to train successfully as a Jedi, plus the fact that there are just so very many human norms in the galaxy (not to mention all of the myriad variants of near-humanity, more of whom tend to be highly Force-sensitive than not), when regarded from the viewpoint of numbers alone, percentage-wise, the smaller instance of high Force-sensitivity in Mon Cal still tends to be hugely outnumbered by the higher overall instance of strong Force-sensitivity in such other sentient species as humanity, and so Bant Eerin often finds herself alone at the Jedi Temple, far outnumbered by humans and near-humans, feeling strange and alien among humanoids and non-humanoids generally not semiaquatic in nature and usually aging at a far different rate than her in any case, and missing the ocean something fierce, even though she can only just barely remembers Dac, having been brought to the Temple at the exceedingly young age of six.
02.) Minimize: One of the first tricks she’s taught to do with the Force - to help make her more comfortable, as she’s told, though later on she suspects that it may’ve been to help minimize the steps the Temple needed to take, to keep her healthy and comfortable - is to hold a fine layer of water mist around her body, tight to her skin like a form-fitting garment, so that she won’t dry out away from the water: a tall, near-human young Jedi Knight by the name of Qui-Gon Jinn is her instructor (his variant of near-human apparently preferring to be a little colder and a little wetter than human norms are at all comfortable with), and, when he cuts one of their sessions short so that he can pay a visit he’s promised to the youngling he’s sure will one day be his Padawan (his first, as he informs her, the softness in his voice making it clear that the boy is obviously very near to the young Knight’s heart), in the Healers’ Ward with a bad case of the flu, she decides that she probably likes the otherwise somewhat stern and imposing Jedi Knight.
03.) Isolation: Mon Cal age at a slightly different rate than human norms do, their childhoods extending well into their teens and their adulthood generally beginning between the ages of about thirty and thirty-five, and so both comes to the Temple much later than usual and is in the crèche for about half a dozen years more than most of her fellow initiates, which (unfortunately) does not do much of anything to help with her sense of isolation all that much.
04.) Special: Bant becomes friends, of sorts, with a Dressellian initiate by the name of Reeft when she’s about ten, more out of a sense of loneliness than anything else, at first (since Dressellians and Mon Cals as strong in the Force as she is tend to have similar aging cycles, which makes an alliance between them logical, even if the youngling eats so prodigiously and spends so much time laughing and talking that she’s at first not entirely sure they’re going to get along all that well); is about fifteen when she first notices a human initiate by the name of Garen Muln and, at Reeft’s urging, becomes friends with him, as well; and about sixteen when she realizes that the three-year-old Obi-Wan Kenobi is likely the single most troubled and most special of all the initiates is the crèche considered to be in her age group, his night terrors rocking the whole of the Temple complex and his laughter during the day somehow making everything seem bright and welcoming and new and alive with potential and joy again.
05.) View: She perceives differences in most species - especially in humans and near-humans - less from physical variances like eye or hair color or slight differences in overall shape and form than from differences in scent and voice and body language, her eyes being generally far weaker out of water and unable to perceive variations of fine detail of appearance (as Mon Cal eyes, despite being able to swivel independently of each other, permitting one to focus on two entirely separate areas of space at once, see in different wavelengths than that processed by humans and the majority of near-humans, making it extremely difficult for one species to either view visuals or else to pick out fine detail in a physical presentation either designed for or meant to be processed by the eyes of the other species, and vice versa) and so Garen’s gift for mimicry is, to her, all that much more startling, as the young human boy somehow or another manages to capture vocal tones and body language and even, somehow, to unconsciously draw on the Force to alter his scent, when he goes about pretending to be someone else.
06.) Water: She sees the Fore in terms of currents and eddies, like streams of sparkling water, and, around Obi-Wan, the Force whirls and crashes and foams like tidal waves cresting out of control, and there are times when she finds herself half mesmerized, lost in the play of light and power and sense of movement forever surrounding him.
07.) Sickness: Healing, for Bant, is essentially more than half pure instinct: she feels sickness as a disturbance within the Force, senses it as if it were a pollutant clouding otherwise clear flowing water, an unnatural contaminant dirtying a clean flow, or a foreign and harmful blockage damming up or harmfully diverting a natural current, something obviously out of place and wrong, all but shouting out for her to address, redress, remove, and, by the time she’s sixteen, she’s already automatically reaching out to separate out these things, these spots of wrongness, to help restore individuals to their whole and hale selves again, without really having any clear idea as to what she’s really doing or how, just that it feels right to do so and so she much act.
08.) Talent: A human (apparently of Tholothian descent) Jedi Knight by the name of Adi Gallia, who apparently possesses more than a little experience at self-healing (and who, apparently is both skilled and wise enough that she is awarded the title of Master not long after observing Bant at work, eventually even earning a seat for herself on the High Council about a decade later), catches her separating out a dark blotch of wrongness on the sparkling eddy and flow of a crèchemate - in essence, curing the human girl of an extremely bad cold - and hauls her off to the Healers’ Ward, chattering excitedly about natural talent and gifts, and that’s pretty much when the question of Bant’s eventual area of special primary study in the Order is settled, as it’s automatically assumed, after that, that she eventually will become a Healer, one way or another, even if she washes out of training at the Temple before being chosen as a Padawan or Knighted as a full Jedi.
09.) Attack: She has nightmares, for years afterwards, of what happened to Obi-Wan, of the way he suddenly seized up and seemed to explode, like a geyser and a waterspout all in one, with crackling moving sheets of excess Force energy, screaming and screaming and screaming until finally it was too much for him to continue to bear and he tumbled down into unconsciousness, and she’s sure, in her heart of hearts, that what she witnessed was an attack - not a real sickness, but an actual physical attack on the five-year-old borderline human/near-human youngling - though she cannot convince anyone else (save, of course, for Reeft and Garen, the first of whom is naturally more suspicious than the rest o f them, for all of his nominal good cheer, and the second of whom is so desperately heartbroken and laid to waste by his friend’s sudden ill health that he’s ready to consider anything, if it might help to arrive at some sort of way for them to figure out a way to help Obi) that she’s not simply imagining things.
10.) Care: It’s not so much that Bant ever minds the assumption that she should and so will be a Healer - especially after what happens with Obi-Wan, she’s determined to know how to take care of people, how to stop something like that from ever happening to anyone else ever again - but she can’t quite stop herself from occasionally thinking that just once it’d be nice if someone bothered to ask her, first, what she actually wants.
11.) Tide: She knows that Garen is too close to Obi-Wan - she can sense it, the danger of it, like watching what should, by all rights, be a separate current get closer and closer to the threshold of a tidal flow so strong that, inevitably, it will be sucked in and subsumed, absorbed, by the greater tide - but doesn’t know what to say about it or how she can help, especially now that Obi is, well, just so very different, so strangely innocent and apart from such things, so it’s a relief, to her, when Reeft throws care and tact and all caution out the airlock and bluntly asks Garen if he’s in love with Obi now or what.
12.) Vicious: She finds it intensely frustrating that everyone - including the Masters who’re supposed to be helping them and looking out for them and setting a good example, for stars’ sakes, as they prepare them for the possibility of one day becoming full Jedi - seems to know about what Bruck Chun and that stooge of his, Aalto, keep trying to do to Obi-Wan, but that no one seems willing to do anything about it, even though their actions have been escalating steadily from simply mean-spirited taunts to outright vicious verbal attacks to actual attempts to minor physical assault and show no signs of slowing down or of ceasing to continue to escalate.
13.) Danger: Master Jinn - Knight Jinn, technically, though she gets the feeling she would be severely reprimanded by the man, if she were to ever point out the fact that he has not actually been granted the honorific of Master, outside of any relationship he might choose to forge with an apprentice - has been different, since the loss of Xanatos, and, frankly, the man makes her danger sense resound like a violently rung bell, so she’s more aghast than shocked when she finally figures out that Master Yoda is determinedly (stubbornly, despite Qui-Gon Jinn’s apparent disinterest in taking another - any other - Padawan) trying to push Obi-Wan together with Knight Jinn.
14.) Crack: Bant clearly remembers Xanatos of Telos IV - remembers hearing about how he was really too old for the Temple but was accepted anyway, because Master Dooku took such a marked interest in the human youngling, when Qui-Gon came back to the Temple from a solo mission with the boy in tow; remembers being told about the controversy that surrounded Knight Jinn’s claiming of the boy as his Padawan, after she’d become friends with Obi-Wan and made inquiries as to the nature of the young apprentice who was so very close with Obi; remembers the way Xanatos and Obi used to spend hours together, just cuddled up close (especially but not necessarily always just after one of Obi’s more violent bouts of night terrors), as if attempting to press together until they were but one flesh only; remembers being distracted from the attack on Obi-Wan and his lapse into a coma by the news of Xanatos’ abandonment, of crying so hard that it had felt as if the heart in her chest would crack in two from the pressure upon it - and is not at all surprised to discover that the (grossly unfairly, in her opinion) cast-off former Padawan and essential rulers of all Telos appears to harbor an obsession with his former Master’s new apprentice . . . nor that Master Jinn appears to be cold enough to attempt to use fascination that against the young man.
15.) Value: She loves Obi-Wan no matter what, of course - he’s her friend, one of her very best friends, and, thanks to Reeft, her blood-bonded brother: how could she not love him? - but some days she desperately wishes that he were himself again, the fearless bright shining ocean of stars at the center of her world (not to mention the sole reason she and her friends ever been referred to as the Fearsome Foursome), and not this ghostly pale imitation, whose sense of inherent value or self-worth is so lacking that he not only allows Qui-Gon Jinn to run roughshod all over him but actually argues for the man’s right to do so!
16.) Calm: She is serene, as Obi puts it, mainly because she has such an explosive temper that she has to fight very hard, sometimes, to keep it in check at all - so hard, in fact, that, if she’s not careful, her displeasures tend to manifest themselves in the local environment, temperature rising precipitously or plummeting without warning and local weather changing wildly, according to her dominant emotions, sudden downpours and violent lightning storms and mists or fogs and localized blizzards (and occasional ice storms) and blazingly, pitilessly hot days springing up all but instantaneously, depending on the tenor and the depth of her bad mood - and, though she may seem oddly calm in the aftermath of her near-murder by that animal Chun, the truth of her dangerously high emotions is far more accurately revealed by the superheated steam exploding out of the tops of several of the most proximate fountains in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, as she is lead away to visit the Healers.
17.) Guilt: Siri Tachi’s increasingly obsessive interest in Obi-Wan both worries her and vaguely creeps her out, but she knows that Obi values the girl’s opinion (if for reasons that utterly elude her comprehension), so she goes to her, to tell her about the crushing guilt plaguing Obi-Wan since Bruck’s accidental (and entirely deserved) death, and then sits back with a small smile while the brash blonde girl literally bullies Obi-Wan out of his (ridiculously unwarranted) guilt.
18.) Nervous: She likes Tahl well enough, even if the woman’s knowledge of doctoring is so largely academic that she is, essentially, being wholly tutored by other Knights and Masters who are actual Healers (or who work with the Healers) in her primary field of study, but her Master’s closeness with Qui-Gon Jinn has always made her nervous, so she’s initially far more alarmed for Obi-Wan’s sake than for her own, when she’s abruptly and rather violently orphaned.
19.) Gift: It’s like suddenly being given a wholly unexpected gift, when Kit Fisto offers to take over Tahl’s duties and begin training her as his own apprentice, and it amazes Bant, how incredibly well they fit together and how little it matters to her that most of his doctoring skills involves techniques of battlefield surgery.
20.) Cry: She does not cry when she learns that Master Jinn has died, though she cried when Xanatos died and she wept when Darsha Assant (not a close friend, to be honest, but the best friend of a good friend of Obi-Wan’s and therefore something of a good friend to Bant, also, by default) announced her decision to leave the Order, with Lorn Pavan, and go into hiding, to hopefully avoid attracting the wrath of the Sith Lord she is certain will have reason to hold a grudge against her and Pavan both; she does, however, cry when she learns that Obi - already being whispered of fearfully in the Temple corridors as the Sith Killer, as if it were his proper title and it might incur his wrath to call him anything else, even his given name - has claimed the controversial (far too old, far too attached to his absent mother, far too set in his overly emotional ways) former slave from Tatooine brought away from his home and mother on Qui-Gon’s word as his own apprentice, now that he has been made a Knight.
21.) Power: The first time she meets the boy Anakin Skywalker, she is nearly overwhelmed with the roaring of sheer power in the Force, deafened and awestruck (and terror-struck, almost, as a land-dwelling creature who’s never before seen a sea, upon suddenly and unexpectedly coming face to face with an ocean) by the whirling nexus of absolute power (less like the ocean-large whirlpool that Obi-Wan used to be all the time, before the attack, than either the event horizon of a black hole in reverse or else a supergiant star in the nanosecond after its gravitational collapse and just before it finishes exploding outwards into supernova, endlessly swirling and fountaining and throwing off massive sheets of roaring power) that is apparently the link that’s been forged by Obi-Wan and Anakin.
22.) Sanctuary: Bant worries about her friends constantly - Siri, who ran away from the Temple and the Order supposedly in protest of the Order’s hypocrisy; Darsha, who left after the High Council had so foolishly dismissed reports of a Sith Lord nearly slaying her, in order to be with the man whose word the Council Masters had refused to trust; Garen, who, despite having transferred at least some of his obsessiveness for Obi-Wan to Quinlan Vos, is still dangerously close to allowing himself to be subsumed by Obi’s light; Quinlan, who tries to hide his longing for Obi-Wan in a thousand casual dalliances and an increasingly deeply personal relationship with Garen, skirting dangerously close to entangling himself far too deeply in Garen, in part because Garen anchors him against the tide of darkness his specialized covert work so often brings him into far too close contact with and partially because sinking himself into Garen apparently helps him to fight against the lure of losing himself utterly within the tidal pull of Obi-Wan; Reeft, who refuses to take anything seriously, as a sort of personal coping mechanism, unless it touches on the health and well-being of his blood-bonded brothers and sister . . . at which point he becomes dangerously obsessed with exterminating any and all risks against them; and, of course, Obi himself, who is playing such a dangerous game against the High Council that at times she wonders if it might not have been better if he’d taken the Crown Prince of Alderaan up on his offer and taken Anakin and himself away to the old chapterhouse outside Aldera, claiming sanctuary on Alderaan, and to hell with the High Council’s wishes or approval.
23.) Ignite: She can feel the war coming long before it arrives, and is amazed that so many are so surprised when it finally breaks out, sensing as she has been now for years that the conflict could ignite at literally any moment.
24.) Disaster: The war is something of a cross between a brushfire conflict (because the vast majority of the fighting is all so very distant from the heart of the Republic that it’s almost unreal, affecting the lives of most citizens from the Core to the Colonies almost not at all, aside from all the added security and the gradual mangling of the Galactic Constitution) and a galactic-encompassing disaster in the making, and it never fails to startle her, how directly in impacts some while so many others still remain so ignorant of virtually all of the facts surrounding the conflict and its various battles.
25.) Rotate: She can fly and she can fight well enough, but she’s a far better Healer than a pilot and a better strategist than a soldier, so she tends to rotate between various command staffs, helping to plan various individual campaigns and missions, and certain of the MedStars and RMSUs, tending to those wounded in the battles and trying not to second-guess either herself or anyone else (for perhaps the millionth time) about the logic behind certain plans of attack.
26.) Misery: The Chancellor strikes her as a political scavenger, an opportunist expanding his own personal power base with building blocks of the misery and misfortune of others, and it constantly amazes her how many individuals are taken in by either his kindly old grandfather or his saintly, reluctant leader routine and so fail to see the shrewdly calculating, coldly self-centered, power-hungry personality lurking behind such masks.
27.) Fervor: Anakin reassures and disturbs her in almost equal parts: on the one hand, around Anakin, Obi-Wan is very nearly his old self again, and is almost assured of zealously vigilant protection; yet, on the other, the longer the war progresses, the wilder and more dangerous the boy seems to become, his determination to win (at any expense necessary) frightening her with its all but fanatic fervor.
28.) Contrary: Bant heartily approves of the efforts by such Senators as Bail Organa and Mon Mothma to attempt both to reign in the Supreme Chancellor and to prepare for the possible eventuality in which actual force may become necessary, to stand against him, and desperately wishes that more beings could understand that disapproving of the Chancellor doesn’t mean that one wants to tear down the Republic (quite the contrary, in fact, since most of those among that group who oppose Palpatine do so because they want the Republic to truly be a peacefully united democracy again).
29.) Couple: The abortive attack on the Jedi Temple is one of the single most confusing and terrifying things Bant has ever experienced in her life (worse, even, than the Battle of Geonosis or the attack on Obi-Wan that left him in a coma for roughly thirteen months), and she is still trying to recover her nerve after that experience when she receives yet another violent shock to the system, coming face to glowing form with the apparently perfectly cognizant spirits of Masters Jinn and Dooku, in an experience so absolutely unnerving that it hardly even registers, at first, that Obi-Wan and Anakin are apparently a functioning romantic couple now.
30.) Reality: Faced with a pair of utterly impossible children, she decides that it’s finally time to stop questioning and simply start accepting the new reality that the Force seems to be building, through Obi-Wan and Anakin and the new Grand Masters and their allies, and, after that, Bant finds that it’s much easier for her to retain her calm . . and that she is once again sleeping well and soundly at night, instead of sitting up and worrying into the wee hours of the morning.
Pairing: None as yet.
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline PG-13, maybe (?)
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters from Star Wars, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .
Summary: This is thirty random but chronological moments from the life of Bant Eerin of Gam Quanda, one of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s three closest/oldest friends from the Jedi Temple crèche (hence, one of the “fearsome foursome” of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Garen Muln, Reeft of Clan Heron-Catcher, and Bant herself) and a Mon Calamari Jedi Master well known for her sympathetic heart, her healing touch, her calm and grace, and her unshakeable loyalty to her friends. There is an actual story here - one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together - but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )
Warning: This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Bant Eerin of Gam Quanda’s life, as she has been and is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU Star Wars series You Became to Me. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
Author’s Notes: 1). For anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is compatible with my SW AU trilogy You Became to Me, including the trilogy Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith, if you squint at a few things sideways and view a couple others solely through the lens of Bant’s eyes. 2). Although this is technically modelled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, exactly, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info and a link to the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to whatever the challenge actually is that’s associated with said LJ prompt set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Bant. 3). Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters like Bant or for original characters, for that matter, should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of EU or original characters, for example) or only mentioned in passing are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and that readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! 4). I decided to make the Mon Cal just a wee bit more, well, alien in their physiology (seeing as how they’re not near-human, being amphibious humanoids, and all), which is why Bant physically (and, to a lesser degree, mentally and emotionally) ages at a slower rate than most of her friends in the crèche. I’m going against the EU information regarding her birth date by doing this, but frankly it strikes me as improbable that all of the humanoid species would age exactly like humans and near-humans do, and frankly I figure that other such notable Mon Cal as Admiral Ackbar probably died earlier than normal, due to his extremely hard life, and would not have been overly Force-sensitive anyway, so . . . that’s why I thought that this would make more sense, especially since not a whole lot is heard about Bant once she and her friends have been Knighted (which makes more sense if one can posit that her time as a Padawan necessarily stretched quite a bit longer than, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s period of apprenticeship).
“Bant Eerin of Gam Quanda, Last But Surely Not Least of the Fearsome Foursome”
01.) Percentage: Statistically speaking, as a whole, Mon Calamari tend to have a slightly higher overall sensitivity to the Force than the majority of human norms (possibly because survival on their largely ocean-bound world, with its many different examples of sentiency all competing for sufficient space and resources to spread and thrive, has, historically, required the Mon Cal to be more naturally in tune with their surroundings than most other worlds and moons require of their human occupants); however, given the fact that surprisingly few individual Mon Calamari actually possess the depths of strength in the Force needed to train successfully as a Jedi, plus the fact that there are just so very many human norms in the galaxy (not to mention all of the myriad variants of near-humanity, more of whom tend to be highly Force-sensitive than not), when regarded from the viewpoint of numbers alone, percentage-wise, the smaller instance of high Force-sensitivity in Mon Cal still tends to be hugely outnumbered by the higher overall instance of strong Force-sensitivity in such other sentient species as humanity, and so Bant Eerin often finds herself alone at the Jedi Temple, far outnumbered by humans and near-humans, feeling strange and alien among humanoids and non-humanoids generally not semiaquatic in nature and usually aging at a far different rate than her in any case, and missing the ocean something fierce, even though she can only just barely remembers Dac, having been brought to the Temple at the exceedingly young age of six.
02.) Minimize: One of the first tricks she’s taught to do with the Force - to help make her more comfortable, as she’s told, though later on she suspects that it may’ve been to help minimize the steps the Temple needed to take, to keep her healthy and comfortable - is to hold a fine layer of water mist around her body, tight to her skin like a form-fitting garment, so that she won’t dry out away from the water: a tall, near-human young Jedi Knight by the name of Qui-Gon Jinn is her instructor (his variant of near-human apparently preferring to be a little colder and a little wetter than human norms are at all comfortable with), and, when he cuts one of their sessions short so that he can pay a visit he’s promised to the youngling he’s sure will one day be his Padawan (his first, as he informs her, the softness in his voice making it clear that the boy is obviously very near to the young Knight’s heart), in the Healers’ Ward with a bad case of the flu, she decides that she probably likes the otherwise somewhat stern and imposing Jedi Knight.
03.) Isolation: Mon Cal age at a slightly different rate than human norms do, their childhoods extending well into their teens and their adulthood generally beginning between the ages of about thirty and thirty-five, and so both comes to the Temple much later than usual and is in the crèche for about half a dozen years more than most of her fellow initiates, which (unfortunately) does not do much of anything to help with her sense of isolation all that much.
04.) Special: Bant becomes friends, of sorts, with a Dressellian initiate by the name of Reeft when she’s about ten, more out of a sense of loneliness than anything else, at first (since Dressellians and Mon Cals as strong in the Force as she is tend to have similar aging cycles, which makes an alliance between them logical, even if the youngling eats so prodigiously and spends so much time laughing and talking that she’s at first not entirely sure they’re going to get along all that well); is about fifteen when she first notices a human initiate by the name of Garen Muln and, at Reeft’s urging, becomes friends with him, as well; and about sixteen when she realizes that the three-year-old Obi-Wan Kenobi is likely the single most troubled and most special of all the initiates is the crèche considered to be in her age group, his night terrors rocking the whole of the Temple complex and his laughter during the day somehow making everything seem bright and welcoming and new and alive with potential and joy again.
05.) View: She perceives differences in most species - especially in humans and near-humans - less from physical variances like eye or hair color or slight differences in overall shape and form than from differences in scent and voice and body language, her eyes being generally far weaker out of water and unable to perceive variations of fine detail of appearance (as Mon Cal eyes, despite being able to swivel independently of each other, permitting one to focus on two entirely separate areas of space at once, see in different wavelengths than that processed by humans and the majority of near-humans, making it extremely difficult for one species to either view visuals or else to pick out fine detail in a physical presentation either designed for or meant to be processed by the eyes of the other species, and vice versa) and so Garen’s gift for mimicry is, to her, all that much more startling, as the young human boy somehow or another manages to capture vocal tones and body language and even, somehow, to unconsciously draw on the Force to alter his scent, when he goes about pretending to be someone else.
06.) Water: She sees the Fore in terms of currents and eddies, like streams of sparkling water, and, around Obi-Wan, the Force whirls and crashes and foams like tidal waves cresting out of control, and there are times when she finds herself half mesmerized, lost in the play of light and power and sense of movement forever surrounding him.
07.) Sickness: Healing, for Bant, is essentially more than half pure instinct: she feels sickness as a disturbance within the Force, senses it as if it were a pollutant clouding otherwise clear flowing water, an unnatural contaminant dirtying a clean flow, or a foreign and harmful blockage damming up or harmfully diverting a natural current, something obviously out of place and wrong, all but shouting out for her to address, redress, remove, and, by the time she’s sixteen, she’s already automatically reaching out to separate out these things, these spots of wrongness, to help restore individuals to their whole and hale selves again, without really having any clear idea as to what she’s really doing or how, just that it feels right to do so and so she much act.
08.) Talent: A human (apparently of Tholothian descent) Jedi Knight by the name of Adi Gallia, who apparently possesses more than a little experience at self-healing (and who, apparently is both skilled and wise enough that she is awarded the title of Master not long after observing Bant at work, eventually even earning a seat for herself on the High Council about a decade later), catches her separating out a dark blotch of wrongness on the sparkling eddy and flow of a crèchemate - in essence, curing the human girl of an extremely bad cold - and hauls her off to the Healers’ Ward, chattering excitedly about natural talent and gifts, and that’s pretty much when the question of Bant’s eventual area of special primary study in the Order is settled, as it’s automatically assumed, after that, that she eventually will become a Healer, one way or another, even if she washes out of training at the Temple before being chosen as a Padawan or Knighted as a full Jedi.
09.) Attack: She has nightmares, for years afterwards, of what happened to Obi-Wan, of the way he suddenly seized up and seemed to explode, like a geyser and a waterspout all in one, with crackling moving sheets of excess Force energy, screaming and screaming and screaming until finally it was too much for him to continue to bear and he tumbled down into unconsciousness, and she’s sure, in her heart of hearts, that what she witnessed was an attack - not a real sickness, but an actual physical attack on the five-year-old borderline human/near-human youngling - though she cannot convince anyone else (save, of course, for Reeft and Garen, the first of whom is naturally more suspicious than the rest o f them, for all of his nominal good cheer, and the second of whom is so desperately heartbroken and laid to waste by his friend’s sudden ill health that he’s ready to consider anything, if it might help to arrive at some sort of way for them to figure out a way to help Obi) that she’s not simply imagining things.
10.) Care: It’s not so much that Bant ever minds the assumption that she should and so will be a Healer - especially after what happens with Obi-Wan, she’s determined to know how to take care of people, how to stop something like that from ever happening to anyone else ever again - but she can’t quite stop herself from occasionally thinking that just once it’d be nice if someone bothered to ask her, first, what she actually wants.
11.) Tide: She knows that Garen is too close to Obi-Wan - she can sense it, the danger of it, like watching what should, by all rights, be a separate current get closer and closer to the threshold of a tidal flow so strong that, inevitably, it will be sucked in and subsumed, absorbed, by the greater tide - but doesn’t know what to say about it or how she can help, especially now that Obi is, well, just so very different, so strangely innocent and apart from such things, so it’s a relief, to her, when Reeft throws care and tact and all caution out the airlock and bluntly asks Garen if he’s in love with Obi now or what.
12.) Vicious: She finds it intensely frustrating that everyone - including the Masters who’re supposed to be helping them and looking out for them and setting a good example, for stars’ sakes, as they prepare them for the possibility of one day becoming full Jedi - seems to know about what Bruck Chun and that stooge of his, Aalto, keep trying to do to Obi-Wan, but that no one seems willing to do anything about it, even though their actions have been escalating steadily from simply mean-spirited taunts to outright vicious verbal attacks to actual attempts to minor physical assault and show no signs of slowing down or of ceasing to continue to escalate.
13.) Danger: Master Jinn - Knight Jinn, technically, though she gets the feeling she would be severely reprimanded by the man, if she were to ever point out the fact that he has not actually been granted the honorific of Master, outside of any relationship he might choose to forge with an apprentice - has been different, since the loss of Xanatos, and, frankly, the man makes her danger sense resound like a violently rung bell, so she’s more aghast than shocked when she finally figures out that Master Yoda is determinedly (stubbornly, despite Qui-Gon Jinn’s apparent disinterest in taking another - any other - Padawan) trying to push Obi-Wan together with Knight Jinn.
14.) Crack: Bant clearly remembers Xanatos of Telos IV - remembers hearing about how he was really too old for the Temple but was accepted anyway, because Master Dooku took such a marked interest in the human youngling, when Qui-Gon came back to the Temple from a solo mission with the boy in tow; remembers being told about the controversy that surrounded Knight Jinn’s claiming of the boy as his Padawan, after she’d become friends with Obi-Wan and made inquiries as to the nature of the young apprentice who was so very close with Obi; remembers the way Xanatos and Obi used to spend hours together, just cuddled up close (especially but not necessarily always just after one of Obi’s more violent bouts of night terrors), as if attempting to press together until they were but one flesh only; remembers being distracted from the attack on Obi-Wan and his lapse into a coma by the news of Xanatos’ abandonment, of crying so hard that it had felt as if the heart in her chest would crack in two from the pressure upon it - and is not at all surprised to discover that the (grossly unfairly, in her opinion) cast-off former Padawan and essential rulers of all Telos appears to harbor an obsession with his former Master’s new apprentice . . . nor that Master Jinn appears to be cold enough to attempt to use fascination that against the young man.
15.) Value: She loves Obi-Wan no matter what, of course - he’s her friend, one of her very best friends, and, thanks to Reeft, her blood-bonded brother: how could she not love him? - but some days she desperately wishes that he were himself again, the fearless bright shining ocean of stars at the center of her world (not to mention the sole reason she and her friends ever been referred to as the Fearsome Foursome), and not this ghostly pale imitation, whose sense of inherent value or self-worth is so lacking that he not only allows Qui-Gon Jinn to run roughshod all over him but actually argues for the man’s right to do so!
16.) Calm: She is serene, as Obi puts it, mainly because she has such an explosive temper that she has to fight very hard, sometimes, to keep it in check at all - so hard, in fact, that, if she’s not careful, her displeasures tend to manifest themselves in the local environment, temperature rising precipitously or plummeting without warning and local weather changing wildly, according to her dominant emotions, sudden downpours and violent lightning storms and mists or fogs and localized blizzards (and occasional ice storms) and blazingly, pitilessly hot days springing up all but instantaneously, depending on the tenor and the depth of her bad mood - and, though she may seem oddly calm in the aftermath of her near-murder by that animal Chun, the truth of her dangerously high emotions is far more accurately revealed by the superheated steam exploding out of the tops of several of the most proximate fountains in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, as she is lead away to visit the Healers.
17.) Guilt: Siri Tachi’s increasingly obsessive interest in Obi-Wan both worries her and vaguely creeps her out, but she knows that Obi values the girl’s opinion (if for reasons that utterly elude her comprehension), so she goes to her, to tell her about the crushing guilt plaguing Obi-Wan since Bruck’s accidental (and entirely deserved) death, and then sits back with a small smile while the brash blonde girl literally bullies Obi-Wan out of his (ridiculously unwarranted) guilt.
18.) Nervous: She likes Tahl well enough, even if the woman’s knowledge of doctoring is so largely academic that she is, essentially, being wholly tutored by other Knights and Masters who are actual Healers (or who work with the Healers) in her primary field of study, but her Master’s closeness with Qui-Gon Jinn has always made her nervous, so she’s initially far more alarmed for Obi-Wan’s sake than for her own, when she’s abruptly and rather violently orphaned.
19.) Gift: It’s like suddenly being given a wholly unexpected gift, when Kit Fisto offers to take over Tahl’s duties and begin training her as his own apprentice, and it amazes Bant, how incredibly well they fit together and how little it matters to her that most of his doctoring skills involves techniques of battlefield surgery.
20.) Cry: She does not cry when she learns that Master Jinn has died, though she cried when Xanatos died and she wept when Darsha Assant (not a close friend, to be honest, but the best friend of a good friend of Obi-Wan’s and therefore something of a good friend to Bant, also, by default) announced her decision to leave the Order, with Lorn Pavan, and go into hiding, to hopefully avoid attracting the wrath of the Sith Lord she is certain will have reason to hold a grudge against her and Pavan both; she does, however, cry when she learns that Obi - already being whispered of fearfully in the Temple corridors as the Sith Killer, as if it were his proper title and it might incur his wrath to call him anything else, even his given name - has claimed the controversial (far too old, far too attached to his absent mother, far too set in his overly emotional ways) former slave from Tatooine brought away from his home and mother on Qui-Gon’s word as his own apprentice, now that he has been made a Knight.
21.) Power: The first time she meets the boy Anakin Skywalker, she is nearly overwhelmed with the roaring of sheer power in the Force, deafened and awestruck (and terror-struck, almost, as a land-dwelling creature who’s never before seen a sea, upon suddenly and unexpectedly coming face to face with an ocean) by the whirling nexus of absolute power (less like the ocean-large whirlpool that Obi-Wan used to be all the time, before the attack, than either the event horizon of a black hole in reverse or else a supergiant star in the nanosecond after its gravitational collapse and just before it finishes exploding outwards into supernova, endlessly swirling and fountaining and throwing off massive sheets of roaring power) that is apparently the link that’s been forged by Obi-Wan and Anakin.
22.) Sanctuary: Bant worries about her friends constantly - Siri, who ran away from the Temple and the Order supposedly in protest of the Order’s hypocrisy; Darsha, who left after the High Council had so foolishly dismissed reports of a Sith Lord nearly slaying her, in order to be with the man whose word the Council Masters had refused to trust; Garen, who, despite having transferred at least some of his obsessiveness for Obi-Wan to Quinlan Vos, is still dangerously close to allowing himself to be subsumed by Obi’s light; Quinlan, who tries to hide his longing for Obi-Wan in a thousand casual dalliances and an increasingly deeply personal relationship with Garen, skirting dangerously close to entangling himself far too deeply in Garen, in part because Garen anchors him against the tide of darkness his specialized covert work so often brings him into far too close contact with and partially because sinking himself into Garen apparently helps him to fight against the lure of losing himself utterly within the tidal pull of Obi-Wan; Reeft, who refuses to take anything seriously, as a sort of personal coping mechanism, unless it touches on the health and well-being of his blood-bonded brothers and sister . . . at which point he becomes dangerously obsessed with exterminating any and all risks against them; and, of course, Obi himself, who is playing such a dangerous game against the High Council that at times she wonders if it might not have been better if he’d taken the Crown Prince of Alderaan up on his offer and taken Anakin and himself away to the old chapterhouse outside Aldera, claiming sanctuary on Alderaan, and to hell with the High Council’s wishes or approval.
23.) Ignite: She can feel the war coming long before it arrives, and is amazed that so many are so surprised when it finally breaks out, sensing as she has been now for years that the conflict could ignite at literally any moment.
24.) Disaster: The war is something of a cross between a brushfire conflict (because the vast majority of the fighting is all so very distant from the heart of the Republic that it’s almost unreal, affecting the lives of most citizens from the Core to the Colonies almost not at all, aside from all the added security and the gradual mangling of the Galactic Constitution) and a galactic-encompassing disaster in the making, and it never fails to startle her, how directly in impacts some while so many others still remain so ignorant of virtually all of the facts surrounding the conflict and its various battles.
25.) Rotate: She can fly and she can fight well enough, but she’s a far better Healer than a pilot and a better strategist than a soldier, so she tends to rotate between various command staffs, helping to plan various individual campaigns and missions, and certain of the MedStars and RMSUs, tending to those wounded in the battles and trying not to second-guess either herself or anyone else (for perhaps the millionth time) about the logic behind certain plans of attack.
26.) Misery: The Chancellor strikes her as a political scavenger, an opportunist expanding his own personal power base with building blocks of the misery and misfortune of others, and it constantly amazes her how many individuals are taken in by either his kindly old grandfather or his saintly, reluctant leader routine and so fail to see the shrewdly calculating, coldly self-centered, power-hungry personality lurking behind such masks.
27.) Fervor: Anakin reassures and disturbs her in almost equal parts: on the one hand, around Anakin, Obi-Wan is very nearly his old self again, and is almost assured of zealously vigilant protection; yet, on the other, the longer the war progresses, the wilder and more dangerous the boy seems to become, his determination to win (at any expense necessary) frightening her with its all but fanatic fervor.
28.) Contrary: Bant heartily approves of the efforts by such Senators as Bail Organa and Mon Mothma to attempt both to reign in the Supreme Chancellor and to prepare for the possible eventuality in which actual force may become necessary, to stand against him, and desperately wishes that more beings could understand that disapproving of the Chancellor doesn’t mean that one wants to tear down the Republic (quite the contrary, in fact, since most of those among that group who oppose Palpatine do so because they want the Republic to truly be a peacefully united democracy again).
29.) Couple: The abortive attack on the Jedi Temple is one of the single most confusing and terrifying things Bant has ever experienced in her life (worse, even, than the Battle of Geonosis or the attack on Obi-Wan that left him in a coma for roughly thirteen months), and she is still trying to recover her nerve after that experience when she receives yet another violent shock to the system, coming face to glowing form with the apparently perfectly cognizant spirits of Masters Jinn and Dooku, in an experience so absolutely unnerving that it hardly even registers, at first, that Obi-Wan and Anakin are apparently a functioning romantic couple now.
30.) Reality: Faced with a pair of utterly impossible children, she decides that it’s finally time to stop questioning and simply start accepting the new reality that the Force seems to be building, through Obi-Wan and Anakin and the new Grand Masters and their allies, and, after that, Bant finds that it’s much easier for her to retain her calm . . and that she is once again sleeping well and soundly at night, instead of sitting up and worrying into the wee hours of the morning.