“Yoda of the People: When Over One Thousand Years Old You Are, Made Some Mistakes You Will...
Title: “Yoda of the People: When Over One Thousand Years Old You Are, Made Some Mistakes You Will Have, Too!”
Pairing: Not applicable.
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-three random but essentially chronological (if with some overlap) moments from the life of Yoda, one of the most renowned Jedi Masters in recorded/preserved galactic history (legendary for his wisdom, mastery of the Force, and skill in lightsaber combat, among other talents), who served on the Jedi High Council for roughly the last five centuries of the Galactic Republic’s duration and reigned as the Jedi Order’s Grand Master for over a century preceding the Clone Wars; yet, who, in the end, also failed the Order so completely that he had to be purged of his fear publicly and replaced by a bonded duo as Grand Masters when the Order underwent its rebirth as the New Jedi Bendu Order. 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 Yoda’s life, as he 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! (I get the feeling this may be a bit uneven and odd around the edges, in part because this isn’t a character I particularly care for!)
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 Yoda’s eyes. 2). Although this is technically modelled on a prompt set that I pieced together from a couple of prompts sets I borrowed from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, precisely, 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 challenges actually are that’re associated with said LJ prompt sets. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Yoda. 3). Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters (like Xanatos) and/or original characters (like Samiratu Bherndt) should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and of 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). There’s not a whole lot known about Yoda’s species or even Yoda himself, prior to the period just predating the Clone Wars, due mainly to the fact that George Lucas has (for whatever reasons) deliberately maintained a strict policy of keeping the history, name, origin, and whereabouts of Yoda’s species entirely secret and has apparently not precisely encouraged writers/artists to include Yoda overly much in their creations (apparently even ordering the pulping of the entire print run of a yet-to-be-released Star Wars trading card depicting a group of Yoda’s unknown tridactyl species worshiping a larger-than-life-size statue of one of their number, led in prayer by an individual who may or may not have been intended to be Yoda). So I’m basically winging his entire backstory here, prior to what’s known of Yoda’s involvement in the Order, based on what is known of the Force (canon and EU) and what I believe to be one of the most probable explanations for the basic utter dearth of knowledge on both Yoda’s species and Yoda himself (not to mention other examples of his species, such as Yaddle). 5). Lucas has, for some reason, specifically stated that Yoda had never visited Dagobah before, prior to his exile, so even though the world where Master N’Kata Del Gormo originally found Yoda sounds a lot like Dagobah, evidently it wasn’t. Hence, my own creation of a name and location for the world, since it’s not named or specifically located (that I know of) anywhere in the EU. 6). I would ask that readers please keep in mind that the motivations I’ve supplied to try to explain certain of Yoda’s otherwise rather inexplicable actions, in both the EU and canon, are merely my interpretation of events, with what I consider to be the most rational/logical explanations possible supplied to explicate his state of mind and his reasons/self-justifications for acting as he does, based largely on the fact that, even though Yoda is supposed to be highly gifted with far-sight (and is also supposed to be an extremely wise and benevolent leader of the Jedi Order), a lot of actions on his part frankly seem foolish, counterproductive, destructive, and even downright malicious/malignant (especially for someone who’s supposed to be able to see at least a part of the future and should therefore know better!). 7). Readers should please keep in mind that the calendars mainly used in my AU ’verse revolve around events such as the founding of the Galactic Republic, the Ruusan Reformations, and the founding of the New Alliance of the Republic, rather than counting forwards or backwards from the events of the Battle of Yavin (which does not precisely occur, as such - at least not as something significant enough to be used to mark the end of an epoch and justify starting to use a new calendar - in my ’verse)! The Galactic Republic is founded roughly 25,000ish Galactic Standard Years prior to the outbreak of the Clones Wars, via the Battle of Geonosis; the Ruusan Reformations occurred roughly 1,000 years before the Battle of Geonosis; the Clone Wars ends in what would roughly be the very end of either 25,004 ARF (After Republic’s Founding) or 1,003 ARR (After Ruusan Reformations), at which point the New Alliance of the Republic is founded, meaning that this becomes year zero and the following year is 1 ANA (After New Alliance); and, just to help keep everyone straight, the Battle of Geonosis happens in 22 BBY, with the Clone Wars ending in 19 BBY.
“Yoda of the People: When Over One Thousand Years Old You Are, Made Some Mistakes You Will Have, Too!”
01.) Short: His species of beings isn’t simple and neither are its members fools, despite their short stature and apparently funny appearance and noted ability to maul galactic standard speech: they are merely cautious, preferring to be under- rather than overestimated (in terms of strength, intelligence, ability, etc.), and besides, figuring out how to speak with a backwards syntax that’s still at least mostly understandable (given some thought and a little patience) to others is both similar enough to the riddling games that permeate the speech patterns of their own language to remind of home and entertaining enough (if only to watch the expressions on others’ faces, especially at first meetings) to partially make up for the indignity of having to tolerate the tendency of taller beings to assume that, because of the short stature and huge ears and large eyes of his species, that he (and others like him) are little more than strange, funny little children.
02.) Hive: His species is not wildly known in the galaxy largely due to the fact that they are, first of all, naturally so telepathic as to be all but hive-minded, among their clan groups - only those born extremely defective, unable to commune fully with the shared overmind of the clan and the greater Overmind of the People are ever sent away from their green gem of a watery world - second of all excel in Force illusion and mind trickery and have gone to great lengths to erase not only their planet but the whole of their system from the larger galaxy’s greater perception and the consciousness of anyone who might accidentally come into contact with it or early records of it, thirdly hail from a planet so far from the heart of the Galactic Republic that, even if their world were not hidden, it wouldn’t be at all that likely that they’d be casually discovered by explorers, and, fourthly, are simply by and large uninterested in ever leaving the paradise of their own planet for any other place, being interested far more in their games and riddles and the sharing of their linked consciousnesses and the pouring over of knowledge of the many ages of the People’s existence, as passed down from one long-lived generation to the next, than in discovering facts about other worlds and beings.
03.) Defective: He was born one of the few who are highly defective - possessing what, for the People, is a disturbing lack of ability to fully join minds with others of his kind, areas of his brain being so malformed and strange that, rather than possessing the potential for communing with the clan overmind and the Overmind of the whole of the People, he possessed instead a pathological (and, to the People, downright psychotic, unnaturally turning outwards rather than inwards) curiosity about things beyond the scope of their world - and, after a century or so of attempting to fix/rehabilitate him, the People by consensus decided that it would be impossible (short of resorting to drastic measures that would essentially lobotomize his brain to the point where the whole of his being would be completely at the mercy of the Overmind, in essence allowing him as an individual to be utterly and eternally subsumed into that greater combined mind of the People, in a procedure that, while having been practiced in the earliest ages of the People’s evolution, was considered to abhorrent and unnatural to carry out, even if the subject in question should beg) to ever completely mend what was wrong in his mind and his physiology, and concluded that they needed to send him out beyond their planet’s system into the greater galaxy of the Republic, to seek a place wherein he might indulge his bizarre curiosity about other places and alien beings and not feel so excluded and isolated by his inability to truly join with the People as to be in danger of attempting to resort to self-destruction.
04.) Survive: If they survive the consequences of their insatiable curiosity, those of the People who are born as he is do have one distinct advantage over the rest of the People: their altered biochemistry results in a longer lifespan than that of their uncurious relatives and so they tend to live (or at least are able to live) about a millennia or so, if they take proper care of themselves and do not burn themselves up too quickly with their other talents, instead of the mere four hundred and fifty to five hundred and eighty or so years that others of the People normally do - and longer than that, even, given careful use of their other abilities and/or incidents of occasional suspended animation.
05.) Access: The physical attributes that render him unfit to participate in Overmind also give him access to talents and abilities that, while possessing the potential to be advantageous, can also be dangerous enough to occasionally warrant interference from the People, by means of a forcible removal of the defective one in question from the greater galaxy, if he or she seems intent on causing harm: namely, those who are defective in the area of the People’s kind of telepathy tend to be powerful in other areas, manifesting abilities to interact with the natural flows of the universal sea of light/life most often known in the Republic as the Force, meaning that, if they can behave themselves enough to avoid intervention from the People, it is fairly easy for those of the People who are born as he has been to secure a place for themselves within the greater galaxy, especially now that the Republic has grown so used to having the Jedi Order.
06.) Aid: To aid him on his journey, the People track down a planet far enough out of the way of both their home and the most well traveled paths of the Republic, locate for him a young human boy with enough Force sensitivity to make him a person of interest to the Jedi Order, and arrange to place him on that planet in close enough proximity to that boy to make friends with him and, eventually, to enter into a situation where the Jedi Order will be forced to take notice of them both and offer them a place in one of its Temple complexes.
07.) Learn: The swampy moon of Lakabungu, in the so-called Outer Rim Territories Sluis Sector (specifically, in orbit about the gas giant Vipin, in the outer half of the Dagobah system) both is and is not like the hugely water-rich, green gem of a planet of his homeworld, and Yoda finds himself comfortable enough there that he’s almost a little disappointed, when the Hysalrian (an odd, four-armed, four-eyed giant serpent-like sentient species) Jedi Master N’Kata Del Gormo finds him and his friend, Samiratu Bherndt . . . at least up until he begins to teach them “the ways of the Force” in earnest, that is, at which point he’s entirely too delighted with what he’s been given a chance to learn to complain about much of anything.
08.) Separate: His life is divided into three phases, the details of which he scrupulously keeps separate from each other and the individuals he meets in those various phases of his life (with the one exception to this rule being his first friend not of the People, to whom he will only admit that he does not like to think of his life prior to meeting the Bherndts, permitting Samiratu to assume that he was very young when they met and that he lost own his family and it’s simply too painful for him to think too hard or too long on that period of time in his life), in order to protect the People and keep their home a secret: the hundred and twenty-three years he spent among the People, before being declared too badly damaged and sent out into the larger galaxy to make a life for himself separate from the People; the seventeen years he spent mainly with Samiratu and his family, prior to being offered a place in the Jedi Order by Master N’Kata Kel Gormo; and the period of his life as a Jedi, stretching from roughly 126 ARR (After Ruusan Reformations) to 1,000 ARR and the Battle of Geonosis and onwards . . . even into the new epoch (ANA, After New Alliance) declared by the establishment of the New Alliance of the Republic, though of all the many things that will occur throughout his long life before its end, that’s one of the ones that will end up surprising him the most.
09.) Comfort: It’s Hard as it is, sometimes, to live so long and see so many of the beings he’s worked with and taught and played with and cared for (in the limited fashion of which he is able, given that he cannot commune and so can never truly know the whole of another being), felt affection for, pass on into that embrace of the Force which the embodied refer to as death, he nevertheless still takes comfort in the knowledge that the extended time buys him years in which to teach and work with and play with and feel affection for myriad others, and the thought of how much more he will be able to learn and how many others he will befriend, before his time is up, comforts him hugely.
10.) Company: He’s not sure which of them is more surprised to cross paths, that first time - himself or Yaddle - the birth of ones like them is so rare (the specific mutations/deformations that renders them unable to fully commune with others of the People and yet sensitive enough to the flows of the energy field known as the Force to be able to become Jedi such very chancy things, whereas accidents of curiosity among those like him are so very common); they enjoy each other’s company a great deal, though, especially after she has been made a Master, so he is thoroughly grieved, when she is finally killed in the course of her duty, as a Jedi Master, actually weeping (for a time utterly inconsolable) for one of the rare few times in his life, and, though it is not very Jedi-like of him, he is also fiercely, vindictively glad when the one directly responsible for her death, Granta Omega (son of the Dark Jedi Xanatos) is finally killed.
11.) Calamity: Some years stand out more in his memory than others, of course - in 226 ARR, he both took his first Padawan learner and at least nominally became a Jedi Master (and, in 251 ARR, he was formally granted the honorific of Master, irregardless of whether or not he currently had a Padawan learner); in 490 ARR, he was first elected as a member of the High Council; in 522 ARR, after many years of lending his voice to the lobbying efforts towards the creation of just such a thing, the starship Chu’unthor was built to act as a mobile training facility and academic library, to allow the Jedi to more thoroughly comb the galaxy for Force-sensitives capable of being instructed in the ways of the Force, becoming the first of what was originally intended to be a fleet of just such mobile praxeums, both to aid the Order in expanding its numbers and to help prevent any kind of attack on the Order via its increasingly centralized presence at the Coruscanti Temple complex from causing the Order cataclysmic loss; in 549 ARR, he found and took the diminutive (small even compared to Yoda, while still a youngling, a fact that causes him no end of amusement!) Kushiban Ikrit as his latest Padawan; by roughly 620 ARR, it was widely accepted that he was among the most powerful and wise of all the Jedi Masters, and the current Grand Master of the Order privately informed him that he should be not surprised to be nominated for the position of Grand Master, following either his death or the death of his successor; in 682 ARR, the two kilometer long, one kilometer wide, and roughly fifty meter tall Chu’unthor crash-landed on the Outer Rim world of Dathomir, where, despite possessing numbers with power sufficient to have allowed them to utterly wipe the planet of the present of the so-called Witches of Dathomir (human Force-sensitives descended from the fallen Jedi Knight Allya), at the prompting of the Force, Yoda made the decision to seal and abandon both the ship and its extensive libraries and supplies on Dathomir, taking the Masters and Knights and younglings and the rest of the ship’s crew and withdrawing back to Coruscant with them; in 822, ARR after it became clear that the shape of the Force itself was beginning to flux, becoming murky and uncertain, and the Jedi High Council became convinced that this indicated that the power of the Dark Side was growing, Yoda (by then a senior member of the High Council, having been so for roughly a hundred and fifty years by that point) countered the conclusion of the rest of the High Council (and the majority of the rest of the Jedi aware of the extremely troubling phenomenon), that this indicated the growing power of the Sith or other Dark Side users, putting forth the possibility that the darkening of the Force might instead suggest the imminent approach of the Chosen One, who prophecy said would bring true balance to the Force, sparking a debate that eventually caused several young Jedi to form a breakaway sect, known as the Potentium; at the turning of the year from 850 to 851 ARR, after traveling to Ord Cestus and saving the native X’Ting from disaster, he was extremely amused when the X’Ting chose to honor him by building a giant statue of him, over seventy meters in height, and placing it in their Hall of Heroes; in 855 ARR, following the peaceful death by old age of the current Grand Master, Yoda received and humbly accepted the nomination to fill her place in the Order’s hierarchy; in 892 ARR, the heresy of the Potentium (unwelcomed and feared by the High Council) prompted Yoda to lead a campaign to expel its followers from the Order; after the birth in 920 ARR of one Dooku of Serenno and his parents gracious (if somewhat conditional) decision to allow the boy to be taken to the Temple for training as a Jedi (though only with some conditions agreed to, first), he personally arranged for one of his current favorites, Master Thame Cerulian, to become the boy’s Master, so intrigued was he by the boy’s vast potential (and, roughly ten years later, after encountering yet another intriguing powerful Force-sensitive, he devised a way to do the same again for Qui-Gon Jinn, conceiving a plan by which to arrange for him to be brought together with Dooku, so that Qui-Gon Jinn’s vast strength in the Living Force and Dooku’s equally vast strength in the Unifying Force would one day come to complement and balance one another); late in 968 ARR, he came face to face with the single most terrifyingly luminous-souled being he’d ever come across before in all his long life, in the personage of one Obi-Wan Kenobi, a child rescued by Knight Jinn from a slave market on Tatooine; in 971 ARR, they irretrievably lost Xanatos of Telos IV to his inner darkness, in a test personally devised by Yoda, unfortunately driving a deep wedge between Master Dooku and Knight Jinn and, in the process, almost losing Knight Jinn to his own inner demons, with the near-human being so badly damaged that he did not even seem to notice that some mysterious malady had struck Obi-Wan, putting him into a deep coma that would last just over thirteen months, ending with the boy awakening with his general knowledge of the Force and the galaxy intact but no memories of himself or his time at the Temple and with his inner light strangely dimmed, as though the warping and darkening of the Force had somehow spread itself directly into the young borderline human/near-human; extremely late in 977 ARR, he was forced to take drastic measures to ensure that Obi-Wan Kenobi would be apprenticed to Qui-Gon Jinn, whether Qui-Gon wished to take the boy on as his next apprentice or not and whether there were others in the Order wished to claim the young boy as their Padawan or not, prompted so strongly by the Force that he even deliberately told the youngling falsehoods about him being dismissed to the Agri-Corps in order to arrange for him to accompany Qui-Gon on a mission, so that the Jedi Knight would, in the following year, end up taking him to Padawan; early in 989 ARR, he had to defend the Temple itself against an incursion of the Yinchorri, making him seriously doubt whether the correct decision had actually been made, when the High Council voted to dissolve the mobile academy project, after the crash-landing and abandonment of the Chu’unthor, after all; and then, to top it all off, the very next year, with the invasion of Naboo and the death of Qui-Gon Jinn during its liberation, the return of the Sith was irrefutably confirmed . . . and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the youngling who had once been so very bright, defiantly insisted on taking to apprentice the (much too old, much too fearful, much too attached to his mother, much too set in his ways to ever become a proper Jedi!) former slave that Qui-Gon had insisted on bringing away from Tatooine with the Queen of Naboo’s retinue, one Anakin Skywalker: after that, everything began to run together into one long blur of trouble and calamity, until finally the whole galaxy seemed to go entirely mad - yet, though certain of those more momentous events most certainly would not have happened precisely as they fell out, without his actions and occasional deliberate personal intervention in the unfolding of events, he is quite certain that he will be able to maintain to his dying day, with a perfectly clear conscience, that all that he has done and all that he has acted in prevention of has all been in pursuit of the greatest possible good and all in accordance with the will and nature of the Force, which ever supports the proliferation and the prosperity of life.
12.) Vision: An awesome and terrifying dream he had, mere days before Qui-Gon Jinn returned to the Temple from Telos IV with Xanatos Áediah Valdís Adi-Ai-Aiji in tow - a young human man, dark of hair and blue of eyes and pale of skin, standing with a human seeming youth with luminously pale skin, eyes like oceans, and hair like the corona of a rising or setting sun. They are together in the center of the Council Chamber, side by side, like Master and Padawan. The boy turns to look at the man and, at a nodding smile from him, opens his hands, where they have been folded serenely together, hidden by the long drape of full sleeves of his outer robe . . . and a light erupts from him, terrible and wondrous and awful, so pure and white as to seem positively unearthly, exploding outwards in a shockwave of blinding brightness radiating in all directions, accelerating with incomprehensible speed out across the whole of the Temple complex and the city-world surrounding it, his view of events somehow altering to keep pace, first to show that devouring monster of light blossoming in the sky of the galaxy where Coruscant once was, as if a new heavenly body had been born there, and then to show it expanding, intensifying, a perfect and hideous sphere racing outwards to engulf first neighboring solar systems, then sectors, then regions, and, finally, the whole of the known galaxy and more, a tremendous, horrible rush of whiteness, of Light, spilling out into the seemingly empty spaces separating this galaxy from its neighbors, the effect so horrifying that he wakes himself with a strangled cry, eyes blinded by the memory of light, before the vision can finish unfolding to its end - and, though Xanatos smiled up at him with genuine warmth when Qui-Gon brought him before the High Council, nonetheless, he would still recognize in the boy before him the young man from his dream, and know at once that he must not just act but be willing to do whatever it might take, to ensure that the vision should not be able to come to pass, so that he can save the Order and the Republic and the galaxy at large from a fate so frightful that evidently even when caught in the midst of a far-sight vision his mind still cannot bear to truly see it.
13.) Fate: It is and is not an easy matter, to alter the shape of someone’s natural fate, especially given that visions of the future are as often as not brought about by the efforts of those who are attempting to thwart what they have seen (their actions working against them, to cause the very things they so dread); yet, by combining one’s understanding of the far future with such things as an individual’s potential shatterpoints and innate weaknesses and the sure knowledge of how an individual can best fit together with another to create a stronger whole (and, thus, how to keep such an individual from entering into the kind of rapport where such a greater whole can and will form), it is possible, by many (relatively small and mostly subtle) acts of deliberate sabotage and manipulation, to divert a being away from one path and usher them onto another one altogether, especially when care has been taken to change that individual’s closest companions on such a life’s journey.
14.) Innocent: Although it doubtlessly would’ve been the safest course to take and should by all means have made his terrifying vision of the future an impossibility, because the boy comes to him an innocent, he does not simply kill him outright; yet, because he is a Jedi and because he is devoted to the continuation of the Jedi Order, so that the Republic can remain properly protected, always, he does quite deliberately set out to ruin all possibility of Xanatos having a successful future in the Jedi Order, permitting his training to proceed at an accelerated rate, to stoke his ego high, and then arranging to make him Padawan to a Master wholly unfit to check the growth of that ego or to rein in the boy’s almost obsessive drive for perfection in all things . . . including a very personal code of honor in glaring contrast to the selfless code of conduct required of a Jedi, one all but guaranteed to eventually cause an explosive and irreconcilable conflict between the boy’s individual sense of morality and justness and his Master’s inflexible belief in obeying the will of the Force in all things.
15.) Good: He truly does believe that the Force provides for those who are willing to recognize (and, if necessary, seek out) its bounty, for in the very presentment of his problem is a solution to the matter, just waiting to be found: Qui-Gon Jinn is a deeply good being and an all but perfect Jedi Knight; yet, at the very heart of his greatest strengths also lie his greatest weaknesses, the flaws and potential shatterpoints capable of making him do truly terrible things, in the name of the Force and his own conviction that he, as a Jedi, must ever obey its will - for example, with a connection the Living Force far greater than any other seen in the living memory of all Jedi, save Yoda, the Force is, to Qui-Gon, a constant murmuring presence, informing and guiding all present choices, all possible actions, silent on no one immediately probable matter, making it possible for him to effortlessly live in the moment of the now and to know that he is acting in accordance to the will of the Force . . . and also making it possible for him to assume (seemingly logically, to him, but in fact quite wrongly) that he knows all there is that is worth knowing of the Force and its will, simply because he can sense what the Force may be willing from moment to moment in the ever changing instant of the present, and that the will of the Force in the past and the voices of the possible, probable futures hold neither meaning nor wisdom nor true import and so need be paid no mind whatsoever; similarly, the will to do good and to be good, to obey the Jedi Code and the unwritten laws of conduct within the Order, to protect the sentient beings of the galaxy by upholding the laws and government of the Republic and obeying the will of the Force, to successfully complete missions given out by the High Council and to obey the given word of the Grand Master and others who are higher in the Order’s hierarchy than Qui-Gon, himself, including his own Master, Dooku, while on the one hand fitting Qui-Gon with a zestful will to always do as a Jedi should and an unwavering determination to fulfill the Force’s will and safeguard the good beings of the galaxy, also inclines him to a certain zealous fanaticism about conforming to the rules and teachings that he perceives as being in line with the true will of the Force, meaning that he might obey a certain teaching of his Master fanatically, out of the notion that this one particular act is in accordance with the will of the Force, while also choosing to occasionally disregard the orders of the Grand Master and/or High Council, if he perceives that such a command is at odds with his own notion of the workings of the Jedi Code or the current will of the Force; and, perhaps worst of all, while his conviction can surely stand as a testament to the strength of his character, it can also lead to the kind of blind self-righteousness that all too often leads to the trap of hypocrisy - and it is this that makes him such a good and useful tool, for the destruction of others who are dangerous, as his very conviction and earnest will to serve the Force can be used against him to make him quite blind to the fact that he is both being used as a tool to tear down others and being led by his own stubborn sense of self-righteousness into acts of destructive hypocrisy.
16.) Pity: It is a shame that the Jedi Order no longer permits romantic attachments among its members, for Dooku and Qui-Gon balance in such a way that, were they permitted to truly be together and to remain together, their disparate pieces fitting together to create a new and greater whole, it is unlikely that either their personal weaknesses or their individual strengths could be easily used against them: it is regrettable that Qui-Gon should be the most useful tool at hand for the breaking of one so dangerous, when that one is also naturally meant to be the Padawan of his own former Master: it is a terrible pity that Xanatos should be fated to become Master to one capable of destroying the whole of the galaxy as it is currently known; yet, unfortunately, no matter how much it means he must hurt Dooku or Qui-Gon or Xanatos or indeed any other being or beings, it does not change the fact that his duty, as a Jedi and as Grand Master of the Order, clearly is to do whatever it takes stop the conflagration seen in his vision from ever happening, no matter what the cost, either to himself (by means of his flayed conscience) or to others.
17.) Control: It breaks his heart as nothing else yet has done, to meet Obi-Wan and see the terrible, awesome light within him and to know that he has no choice but to do everything in his power to extinguish that light, to douse it before it can ever become possible that it might escape the boy’s control and so swallow the galaxy whole; yet, because he is Yoda and because it is his duty and he chose this life of duty when he chose to be sent out from the People into the larger galaxy, to serve the light in his own way and to carve out a life for himself separate from that defined by his inescapable limitations and defects, he forces himself to do it, raising the boy up to trust him utterly . . . and then betraying him by seeing to it that he will be apprenticed to none other than Qui-Gon Jinn, the worst possible overall choice to fit with that boy and be his Master.
18.) Dim: True inner light, it seems, is a damnably hard thing to extinguish - treachery can weaken it: betrayal can dim it: violent emotion of a dark enough tenor mixed with true pain of the boy and agony of the spirit can cause it to flicker; yet, love, it seems, however unearned or unwelcome or undeserved by its recipients, has miraculous restorative properties - and so, even though he has seen to the destruction of the boy’s intended Master and paired him with a Knight unfit to Master him, in the process of both all but destroying most of the true goodness of the nature of that Knight and thoroughly alienating from him the only individual capable of restoring that basic goodness of nature, unfortunately, it seems that Obi-Wan remains a potential source for galaxy-shaking change and destruction, and so he finds that he must continue to frequently monitor the young one and constantly take more and more and even more steps to see to it that the energy and intensity and prevalence of that inner light is and remains deeply undermined.
19.) Cipher: He has always been fond of Dooku, even though he’s also always known that the boy could potentially be quite dangerous (his very unpredictability making him dear to Yoda); Qui-Gon’s rebellions he’s generally found to be sources of private amusement, like the antics of a clever but stubborn child; Obi-Wan, though . . . Obi-Wan is both a vergence and a nexus of the Force, his inner light apparently inextinguishable, even after the supposed childhood sickness that left him so altered and an apprenticeship so uneven and so difficult that it nearly left him broken in spirit (the potential in him is still enormous, as proven by the all but miraculous feats he is able to accomplish with the Force, when under pressure), simultaneously sparking both unending awe and almost horrified fascination, and the very thought of that one with a living cipher like Anakin Skywalker (whose future is so cloudy and dim that he can see nothing of it clearly at all, no matter how many hours he spends meditating or how hard he tries to use far-sight to peer ahead at the boy’s future) is so very terrifying that only sheer necessity is enough to make him allow them to stay together.
20.) Teacher: There are, of course, some bright lights to help mediate the increasing darkness surrounding him: the younglings, for one, always manage to brighten his day and lighten his burdens, and, being primarily a teacher at heart, he does his best to always visit with and look after and help to instruct the younger generations, who are (in the main) still so very innocent.
21.) Throne: Bail Organa should have been a Jedi, to be sure (in his estimation, the man would have been a great Jedi Master, quite possibly even as great as or greater than some of his fellows currently serving on the High Council), but it’s so very entertaining, to watch the consternation that follows, among the power brokers and the monied interests of the so-called special interest groups, in the wake of the change he so effortlessly constantly sows among the politicians he works with, that Yoda finds himself whole-heartedly approving of that maniac Jorus C’baoth’s decision to make Organa the proper heir apparent to the Alderaanian throne, especially given how very badly the need for a good man like Organa in the Senate seems to be, nowadays.
22.) Late: Though he does not figure it out until much later, the truth is that the Force had already been darkening, access to its purity of power becoming harder and more limited, more restricted, even when he was first beginning to learn about what it was that he was tapping in to, whenever he’d reach out to touch, draw on, and manipulate one of the shining skeins of energy that make up its ebbs and flows; yet, since it was always a seeming fact of its nature from the time when he first understood that what he was sensing and using was the Force, it took the thoughts/beliefs, fears, and eventual assertions of many others who’d come to observe the trend only dimly in their shorter lifespans to eventually convince him that the phenomenon was something real, something important enough to be worth exploring, something quite possibly not natural . . . a fact for which he eventually blames much of his inability to truly perceive the very real danger posed by the Sith until it was basically already far too late.
23.) Adjust: The Jedi Order has already had over a century - a full lifetime, for most Jedi (if they are lucky and avoid death in battle or otherwise on active duty, while on some mission or another) - to adjust to the Ruusan Reformations, by the time he’s joined it, and so it does not seem to really change or fossilize/degenerate, to him, so much as it merely just seems to steadily, inevitably, become more of itself, more and more set in its ways and firmly united behind its rules and usual manner of doing things (and of being, as it were), and perhaps that is why it never really occurs to him that something may be wrong about the way that the Order is organized and run or that the increasing lack of adaptability and flexibility within both the Order itself and its individual members is in any way detrimental to either the Order or the Republic.
24.) Failure: To be honest, Yoda did notice the Order’s dwindling numbers, after a couple of centuries of working within its bounds, but he spent the next few centuries quietly trying to think of what it could mean, for the Order, if the trend were to continue, rather than acting about it directly, and the next few centuries quietly trying to think of why the slow but steady drop in numbers was occurring, in the first place, and if the trend was some kind of temporary natural phenomenon or something caused by an outside force that could be treated, and the next few centuries trying to arrive at the most ideal means by which to fix it without fundamentally altering the nature of the Order, and the one actual attempt he made, in all that time, to do something to address those dwindling numbers ended in failure, with the Chu’unthor being abandoned and the mobile praxeum program scuttled, and so he’s still unsuccessfully trying to come up with some kind of workable plan of action to reverse the trend without having to actually change the rules and traditions of the Order when the Sith begin to come out of hiding and to make their move to conquer the known galaxy and destroy the Order completely.
25.) Stagnant: That he - a being sent out into the galaxy for being curious and different and changeful and too unlike the People to abide with them - should be set in his ways and dangerously stagnant of thought and purpose is, frankly, a thought that never occurs to him, just as it never occurs to him that he (as the most widely celebrated and renown member of the Jedi Order - the very face of the Jedi Order, for so many, that he is taken to embody/symbolize the whole of the Order, in his very being - and the formal head of the whole Order) could possibly be so controlled by a darker emotion of his that it could deceive him into believing that none of his actions were even so much as influenced by, much less wholly decided by, that sense of fear.
26.) Bother: He has access to all of the Order’s vast stores of knowledge, to records that (though being badly fragmented and lamentably incomplete) easily go back far enough to describe the not only the pre-Ruusan ways but the Order as it was in its relative youth, back when the Republic itself was still very young; yet, because he finds the records indicative of chaos and confusion and those so young as to still be learning how to learn, not an Order in its smoothly functioning, peaceful, prosperous prime, free (or at least relatively free) of inner struggles and dogmatic war with Dark Jedi and Sith, he assumes that the old ways were all fundamentally flawed and set aright only after Ruusan, and so doesn’t bother to even consider pursuing those changes to the Order (either the true reasons for them or their actual repercussions) any further.
27.) Strange: He can sense that there is something just a little bit . . . odd . . . about the Supreme Chancellor, but then, the man is from Naboo, after all, and that world routinely seems to spawn strange and unusual and wonderfully unique individuals (which is precisely why the Order would love to be able to convince the good people of Naboo to send more than, say, maybe one or two of its strong Force-sensitive children to the Temple every three or four hundred years or so to be trained), many of them quite strong in the Force, and so he simply assumes that what he’s almost but not quite sensing is either just a mark of the man’s own particular kind of oddness of else nothing more than an illusion of weirdness based on the fact that, as a Nabooian, he really ought to be more unique than he actually is and less like all the other conniving politicians scattered throughout the galaxy.
28.) Disaster: He thinks, at first, that the Battle of Geonosis may be the most horrible thing he’s ever had to witness; unfortunately, though, he is wrong: the war is one rapid shock to the system after another, the blows all falling so closely together that he feels as though there’s not time to even breathe, much less attempt to recover or process what has been happened, in between each disaster, each atrocity, and the Force is so clogged up with pain and terror and rage that it’s next to impossible to touch it without coming away feeling as if one’s just been bathed both in the battlefield emotions of the killing and the dying and in the putrefying cesspools of vile madness that exist in place of souls within those who have been locked away for being of danger to both other sentient beings and themselves.
29.) Hero: He nearly had Dooku, on Geonosis (would have had him, he cannot help but think, if not for Skywalker, who had gone charging in blindly, alone, letting his anger guide his actions instead of the Force, and nearly gotten his Master killed in the process, giving Dooku the opening he needed to put them both in such a vulnerable position that Yoda could not, in good conscience, continue to press the fight with Dooku, when it was clear that Obi-Wan and Anakin could not move quickly enough to save themselves), and he is quite sure that he would have had him, on Vjun (again, if not for Skywalker, rushing in and ruining everything, all of that time and effort towards showing Dooku that it was still possible for him to return home thrown away like so much rubbish, when the boy came bursting in to the house, thinking of nothing but chasing after Asajj Ventress and not caring that his presence instantly made Dooku suspect a trap), so, even though the galactic media seem determined to make Anakin Skywalker their golden boy and darling, right along with his Master (a fact that does not bother him nearly so much. No. Obi-Wan not only truly deserves the accolades, he does not want them, which, in Yoda’s mind, translates directly into his fitness for receiving them), he cannot help but suspect that this war would be better off, in the long run, without the so-called Hero With No Fear always blundering about into the thick of things.
30.) Pattern: The former Queen of Naboo and now Senator for the Chommell Sector somehow or another keeps entangling herself in the missions of the Jedi, and, while at first he simply assumes that it is the work and will of the Force that keeps throwing her into the company of Jedi, when the pattern doesn’t just continue but violently escalates during the war, he begins to have suspicions regarding the woman’s intentions and to wonder if, for the sake of the war effort, he shouldn’t be trying to at least temporarily discourage her from continuing to work so closely with certain members of the Jedi Order . . . especially after he notices the way she is looking after the Team, after yet another one of those odd involvements, as if she cannot quite make up her mind which one (Kenobi or Skywalker) she wishes to devour first.
31.) Prison: Though he generally has visions of one sort or another when he slides deeply enough into meditation, he does not often dream, so he is shocked for many reasons (perhaps the least of which is that he is dreaming of a man he knows is dead) when he dreams, one night, of waking in his chamber to find an oddly familiar looking young human man (with shockingly pale skin and deeply black hair, full red lips pressed into a flat line of displeasure, bright blue eyes so dark that they almost appear black) standing over him, shaking his head, overlong hair sliding forward to curtain his eyes, voice pitched low as he warns, “If Obi-Wan is hurt in any way because of your fearful small-mindedness and sheer inability to see what is standing right in front of you, I swear by all the stars in all the night skies of all the ’verses in existence that I will find a way to get out of this damned prison solely to hunt you down and make you wish that you had never been born, Yoda.”
32.) Dark: The revelation that he has been behaving, essentially, as a Dark Jedi - a corrupting influence on his beloved Order, blinded by arrogance, driven by his fear and anger to act in ways conducive to an environment of pain and hatred and suffering, his status as the most venerable member of the whole Jedi Order so thoroughly established, over his long centuries of life, that it had become impossible for anyone to ever criticize him (however badly he might have needed it) without sounding blasphemous or even traitorous to both the Order and the Republic. Ironically, in his many long years of service to the Order and to the Republic, he had become so widely regarded as vital and an infallible leader that, as with Chancellor Palpatine, no one ever dared to question him until it was almost too late. His darkness, like Palpatine’s, had been allowed to exist virtually unchallenged, out of blind trust and fear, until finally it could no longer be borne, the Force itself seemingly rising up against him, primarily by way of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker - is so crushing that he finds it difficult to think, next to impossible to truly take in all that is happening, and virtually impossible to know what he should be feeling about it all, much less how he should be reacting.
33.) Taint: Afterwards, Yoda isn’t really sure which among all of the recent occurrences is actually more shocking - learning that Palpatine is the Sith Master Sidious and what he was planning (and how his schemes have been thwarted); feeling Obi-Wan and Anakin join forces to cleanse the Force utterly of the taint that’s built up on it from the proliferation of the so-called Dark Side; learning what those two and those two seemingly impossible Force spirits have planned, both for the Order and the Republic; or finding out how very wrong he’s been about so many things he’s taken for granted for so very long, in his life - yet, whatever the right answer to that particular conundrum may be, he has a feeling that decades, perhaps even centuries, have been shaved off of his life, from all of these shocks, and that nothing and no one, least of all his own diminutive self, is ever going to be the same again . . . particularly not when it is becoming increasingly apparent that he has been huddled in the dark mantle of his own fear for so long and done so much evil and wrong in his life to others (often to those for whom he should have been willing to lay down his life, rather than allowing himself to harm them, as he has, due to his status as the Grand Master) that he owes several individuals an extended apology and attempt at making reparations, even though it is not particularly likely that he will be allowed to remain in this New Jedi Bendu Order long enough to do either, given the nature of some his crimes and those they have been against . . .
Pairing: Not applicable.
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-three random but essentially chronological (if with some overlap) moments from the life of Yoda, one of the most renowned Jedi Masters in recorded/preserved galactic history (legendary for his wisdom, mastery of the Force, and skill in lightsaber combat, among other talents), who served on the Jedi High Council for roughly the last five centuries of the Galactic Republic’s duration and reigned as the Jedi Order’s Grand Master for over a century preceding the Clone Wars; yet, who, in the end, also failed the Order so completely that he had to be purged of his fear publicly and replaced by a bonded duo as Grand Masters when the Order underwent its rebirth as the New Jedi Bendu Order. 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 Yoda’s life, as he 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! (I get the feeling this may be a bit uneven and odd around the edges, in part because this isn’t a character I particularly care for!)
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 Yoda’s eyes. 2). Although this is technically modelled on a prompt set that I pieced together from a couple of prompts sets I borrowed from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, precisely, 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 challenges actually are that’re associated with said LJ prompt sets. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Yoda. 3). Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters (like Xanatos) and/or original characters (like Samiratu Bherndt) should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and of 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). There’s not a whole lot known about Yoda’s species or even Yoda himself, prior to the period just predating the Clone Wars, due mainly to the fact that George Lucas has (for whatever reasons) deliberately maintained a strict policy of keeping the history, name, origin, and whereabouts of Yoda’s species entirely secret and has apparently not precisely encouraged writers/artists to include Yoda overly much in their creations (apparently even ordering the pulping of the entire print run of a yet-to-be-released Star Wars trading card depicting a group of Yoda’s unknown tridactyl species worshiping a larger-than-life-size statue of one of their number, led in prayer by an individual who may or may not have been intended to be Yoda). So I’m basically winging his entire backstory here, prior to what’s known of Yoda’s involvement in the Order, based on what is known of the Force (canon and EU) and what I believe to be one of the most probable explanations for the basic utter dearth of knowledge on both Yoda’s species and Yoda himself (not to mention other examples of his species, such as Yaddle). 5). Lucas has, for some reason, specifically stated that Yoda had never visited Dagobah before, prior to his exile, so even though the world where Master N’Kata Del Gormo originally found Yoda sounds a lot like Dagobah, evidently it wasn’t. Hence, my own creation of a name and location for the world, since it’s not named or specifically located (that I know of) anywhere in the EU. 6). I would ask that readers please keep in mind that the motivations I’ve supplied to try to explain certain of Yoda’s otherwise rather inexplicable actions, in both the EU and canon, are merely my interpretation of events, with what I consider to be the most rational/logical explanations possible supplied to explicate his state of mind and his reasons/self-justifications for acting as he does, based largely on the fact that, even though Yoda is supposed to be highly gifted with far-sight (and is also supposed to be an extremely wise and benevolent leader of the Jedi Order), a lot of actions on his part frankly seem foolish, counterproductive, destructive, and even downright malicious/malignant (especially for someone who’s supposed to be able to see at least a part of the future and should therefore know better!). 7). Readers should please keep in mind that the calendars mainly used in my AU ’verse revolve around events such as the founding of the Galactic Republic, the Ruusan Reformations, and the founding of the New Alliance of the Republic, rather than counting forwards or backwards from the events of the Battle of Yavin (which does not precisely occur, as such - at least not as something significant enough to be used to mark the end of an epoch and justify starting to use a new calendar - in my ’verse)! The Galactic Republic is founded roughly 25,000ish Galactic Standard Years prior to the outbreak of the Clones Wars, via the Battle of Geonosis; the Ruusan Reformations occurred roughly 1,000 years before the Battle of Geonosis; the Clone Wars ends in what would roughly be the very end of either 25,004 ARF (After Republic’s Founding) or 1,003 ARR (After Ruusan Reformations), at which point the New Alliance of the Republic is founded, meaning that this becomes year zero and the following year is 1 ANA (After New Alliance); and, just to help keep everyone straight, the Battle of Geonosis happens in 22 BBY, with the Clone Wars ending in 19 BBY.
“Yoda of the People: When Over One Thousand Years Old You Are, Made Some Mistakes You Will Have, Too!”
01.) Short: His species of beings isn’t simple and neither are its members fools, despite their short stature and apparently funny appearance and noted ability to maul galactic standard speech: they are merely cautious, preferring to be under- rather than overestimated (in terms of strength, intelligence, ability, etc.), and besides, figuring out how to speak with a backwards syntax that’s still at least mostly understandable (given some thought and a little patience) to others is both similar enough to the riddling games that permeate the speech patterns of their own language to remind of home and entertaining enough (if only to watch the expressions on others’ faces, especially at first meetings) to partially make up for the indignity of having to tolerate the tendency of taller beings to assume that, because of the short stature and huge ears and large eyes of his species, that he (and others like him) are little more than strange, funny little children.
02.) Hive: His species is not wildly known in the galaxy largely due to the fact that they are, first of all, naturally so telepathic as to be all but hive-minded, among their clan groups - only those born extremely defective, unable to commune fully with the shared overmind of the clan and the greater Overmind of the People are ever sent away from their green gem of a watery world - second of all excel in Force illusion and mind trickery and have gone to great lengths to erase not only their planet but the whole of their system from the larger galaxy’s greater perception and the consciousness of anyone who might accidentally come into contact with it or early records of it, thirdly hail from a planet so far from the heart of the Galactic Republic that, even if their world were not hidden, it wouldn’t be at all that likely that they’d be casually discovered by explorers, and, fourthly, are simply by and large uninterested in ever leaving the paradise of their own planet for any other place, being interested far more in their games and riddles and the sharing of their linked consciousnesses and the pouring over of knowledge of the many ages of the People’s existence, as passed down from one long-lived generation to the next, than in discovering facts about other worlds and beings.
03.) Defective: He was born one of the few who are highly defective - possessing what, for the People, is a disturbing lack of ability to fully join minds with others of his kind, areas of his brain being so malformed and strange that, rather than possessing the potential for communing with the clan overmind and the Overmind of the whole of the People, he possessed instead a pathological (and, to the People, downright psychotic, unnaturally turning outwards rather than inwards) curiosity about things beyond the scope of their world - and, after a century or so of attempting to fix/rehabilitate him, the People by consensus decided that it would be impossible (short of resorting to drastic measures that would essentially lobotomize his brain to the point where the whole of his being would be completely at the mercy of the Overmind, in essence allowing him as an individual to be utterly and eternally subsumed into that greater combined mind of the People, in a procedure that, while having been practiced in the earliest ages of the People’s evolution, was considered to abhorrent and unnatural to carry out, even if the subject in question should beg) to ever completely mend what was wrong in his mind and his physiology, and concluded that they needed to send him out beyond their planet’s system into the greater galaxy of the Republic, to seek a place wherein he might indulge his bizarre curiosity about other places and alien beings and not feel so excluded and isolated by his inability to truly join with the People as to be in danger of attempting to resort to self-destruction.
04.) Survive: If they survive the consequences of their insatiable curiosity, those of the People who are born as he is do have one distinct advantage over the rest of the People: their altered biochemistry results in a longer lifespan than that of their uncurious relatives and so they tend to live (or at least are able to live) about a millennia or so, if they take proper care of themselves and do not burn themselves up too quickly with their other talents, instead of the mere four hundred and fifty to five hundred and eighty or so years that others of the People normally do - and longer than that, even, given careful use of their other abilities and/or incidents of occasional suspended animation.
05.) Access: The physical attributes that render him unfit to participate in Overmind also give him access to talents and abilities that, while possessing the potential to be advantageous, can also be dangerous enough to occasionally warrant interference from the People, by means of a forcible removal of the defective one in question from the greater galaxy, if he or she seems intent on causing harm: namely, those who are defective in the area of the People’s kind of telepathy tend to be powerful in other areas, manifesting abilities to interact with the natural flows of the universal sea of light/life most often known in the Republic as the Force, meaning that, if they can behave themselves enough to avoid intervention from the People, it is fairly easy for those of the People who are born as he has been to secure a place for themselves within the greater galaxy, especially now that the Republic has grown so used to having the Jedi Order.
06.) Aid: To aid him on his journey, the People track down a planet far enough out of the way of both their home and the most well traveled paths of the Republic, locate for him a young human boy with enough Force sensitivity to make him a person of interest to the Jedi Order, and arrange to place him on that planet in close enough proximity to that boy to make friends with him and, eventually, to enter into a situation where the Jedi Order will be forced to take notice of them both and offer them a place in one of its Temple complexes.
07.) Learn: The swampy moon of Lakabungu, in the so-called Outer Rim Territories Sluis Sector (specifically, in orbit about the gas giant Vipin, in the outer half of the Dagobah system) both is and is not like the hugely water-rich, green gem of a planet of his homeworld, and Yoda finds himself comfortable enough there that he’s almost a little disappointed, when the Hysalrian (an odd, four-armed, four-eyed giant serpent-like sentient species) Jedi Master N’Kata Del Gormo finds him and his friend, Samiratu Bherndt . . . at least up until he begins to teach them “the ways of the Force” in earnest, that is, at which point he’s entirely too delighted with what he’s been given a chance to learn to complain about much of anything.
08.) Separate: His life is divided into three phases, the details of which he scrupulously keeps separate from each other and the individuals he meets in those various phases of his life (with the one exception to this rule being his first friend not of the People, to whom he will only admit that he does not like to think of his life prior to meeting the Bherndts, permitting Samiratu to assume that he was very young when they met and that he lost own his family and it’s simply too painful for him to think too hard or too long on that period of time in his life), in order to protect the People and keep their home a secret: the hundred and twenty-three years he spent among the People, before being declared too badly damaged and sent out into the larger galaxy to make a life for himself separate from the People; the seventeen years he spent mainly with Samiratu and his family, prior to being offered a place in the Jedi Order by Master N’Kata Kel Gormo; and the period of his life as a Jedi, stretching from roughly 126 ARR (After Ruusan Reformations) to 1,000 ARR and the Battle of Geonosis and onwards . . . even into the new epoch (ANA, After New Alliance) declared by the establishment of the New Alliance of the Republic, though of all the many things that will occur throughout his long life before its end, that’s one of the ones that will end up surprising him the most.
09.) Comfort: It’s Hard as it is, sometimes, to live so long and see so many of the beings he’s worked with and taught and played with and cared for (in the limited fashion of which he is able, given that he cannot commune and so can never truly know the whole of another being), felt affection for, pass on into that embrace of the Force which the embodied refer to as death, he nevertheless still takes comfort in the knowledge that the extended time buys him years in which to teach and work with and play with and feel affection for myriad others, and the thought of how much more he will be able to learn and how many others he will befriend, before his time is up, comforts him hugely.
10.) Company: He’s not sure which of them is more surprised to cross paths, that first time - himself or Yaddle - the birth of ones like them is so rare (the specific mutations/deformations that renders them unable to fully commune with others of the People and yet sensitive enough to the flows of the energy field known as the Force to be able to become Jedi such very chancy things, whereas accidents of curiosity among those like him are so very common); they enjoy each other’s company a great deal, though, especially after she has been made a Master, so he is thoroughly grieved, when she is finally killed in the course of her duty, as a Jedi Master, actually weeping (for a time utterly inconsolable) for one of the rare few times in his life, and, though it is not very Jedi-like of him, he is also fiercely, vindictively glad when the one directly responsible for her death, Granta Omega (son of the Dark Jedi Xanatos) is finally killed.
11.) Calamity: Some years stand out more in his memory than others, of course - in 226 ARR, he both took his first Padawan learner and at least nominally became a Jedi Master (and, in 251 ARR, he was formally granted the honorific of Master, irregardless of whether or not he currently had a Padawan learner); in 490 ARR, he was first elected as a member of the High Council; in 522 ARR, after many years of lending his voice to the lobbying efforts towards the creation of just such a thing, the starship Chu’unthor was built to act as a mobile training facility and academic library, to allow the Jedi to more thoroughly comb the galaxy for Force-sensitives capable of being instructed in the ways of the Force, becoming the first of what was originally intended to be a fleet of just such mobile praxeums, both to aid the Order in expanding its numbers and to help prevent any kind of attack on the Order via its increasingly centralized presence at the Coruscanti Temple complex from causing the Order cataclysmic loss; in 549 ARR, he found and took the diminutive (small even compared to Yoda, while still a youngling, a fact that causes him no end of amusement!) Kushiban Ikrit as his latest Padawan; by roughly 620 ARR, it was widely accepted that he was among the most powerful and wise of all the Jedi Masters, and the current Grand Master of the Order privately informed him that he should be not surprised to be nominated for the position of Grand Master, following either his death or the death of his successor; in 682 ARR, the two kilometer long, one kilometer wide, and roughly fifty meter tall Chu’unthor crash-landed on the Outer Rim world of Dathomir, where, despite possessing numbers with power sufficient to have allowed them to utterly wipe the planet of the present of the so-called Witches of Dathomir (human Force-sensitives descended from the fallen Jedi Knight Allya), at the prompting of the Force, Yoda made the decision to seal and abandon both the ship and its extensive libraries and supplies on Dathomir, taking the Masters and Knights and younglings and the rest of the ship’s crew and withdrawing back to Coruscant with them; in 822, ARR after it became clear that the shape of the Force itself was beginning to flux, becoming murky and uncertain, and the Jedi High Council became convinced that this indicated that the power of the Dark Side was growing, Yoda (by then a senior member of the High Council, having been so for roughly a hundred and fifty years by that point) countered the conclusion of the rest of the High Council (and the majority of the rest of the Jedi aware of the extremely troubling phenomenon), that this indicated the growing power of the Sith or other Dark Side users, putting forth the possibility that the darkening of the Force might instead suggest the imminent approach of the Chosen One, who prophecy said would bring true balance to the Force, sparking a debate that eventually caused several young Jedi to form a breakaway sect, known as the Potentium; at the turning of the year from 850 to 851 ARR, after traveling to Ord Cestus and saving the native X’Ting from disaster, he was extremely amused when the X’Ting chose to honor him by building a giant statue of him, over seventy meters in height, and placing it in their Hall of Heroes; in 855 ARR, following the peaceful death by old age of the current Grand Master, Yoda received and humbly accepted the nomination to fill her place in the Order’s hierarchy; in 892 ARR, the heresy of the Potentium (unwelcomed and feared by the High Council) prompted Yoda to lead a campaign to expel its followers from the Order; after the birth in 920 ARR of one Dooku of Serenno and his parents gracious (if somewhat conditional) decision to allow the boy to be taken to the Temple for training as a Jedi (though only with some conditions agreed to, first), he personally arranged for one of his current favorites, Master Thame Cerulian, to become the boy’s Master, so intrigued was he by the boy’s vast potential (and, roughly ten years later, after encountering yet another intriguing powerful Force-sensitive, he devised a way to do the same again for Qui-Gon Jinn, conceiving a plan by which to arrange for him to be brought together with Dooku, so that Qui-Gon Jinn’s vast strength in the Living Force and Dooku’s equally vast strength in the Unifying Force would one day come to complement and balance one another); late in 968 ARR, he came face to face with the single most terrifyingly luminous-souled being he’d ever come across before in all his long life, in the personage of one Obi-Wan Kenobi, a child rescued by Knight Jinn from a slave market on Tatooine; in 971 ARR, they irretrievably lost Xanatos of Telos IV to his inner darkness, in a test personally devised by Yoda, unfortunately driving a deep wedge between Master Dooku and Knight Jinn and, in the process, almost losing Knight Jinn to his own inner demons, with the near-human being so badly damaged that he did not even seem to notice that some mysterious malady had struck Obi-Wan, putting him into a deep coma that would last just over thirteen months, ending with the boy awakening with his general knowledge of the Force and the galaxy intact but no memories of himself or his time at the Temple and with his inner light strangely dimmed, as though the warping and darkening of the Force had somehow spread itself directly into the young borderline human/near-human; extremely late in 977 ARR, he was forced to take drastic measures to ensure that Obi-Wan Kenobi would be apprenticed to Qui-Gon Jinn, whether Qui-Gon wished to take the boy on as his next apprentice or not and whether there were others in the Order wished to claim the young boy as their Padawan or not, prompted so strongly by the Force that he even deliberately told the youngling falsehoods about him being dismissed to the Agri-Corps in order to arrange for him to accompany Qui-Gon on a mission, so that the Jedi Knight would, in the following year, end up taking him to Padawan; early in 989 ARR, he had to defend the Temple itself against an incursion of the Yinchorri, making him seriously doubt whether the correct decision had actually been made, when the High Council voted to dissolve the mobile academy project, after the crash-landing and abandonment of the Chu’unthor, after all; and then, to top it all off, the very next year, with the invasion of Naboo and the death of Qui-Gon Jinn during its liberation, the return of the Sith was irrefutably confirmed . . . and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the youngling who had once been so very bright, defiantly insisted on taking to apprentice the (much too old, much too fearful, much too attached to his mother, much too set in his ways to ever become a proper Jedi!) former slave that Qui-Gon had insisted on bringing away from Tatooine with the Queen of Naboo’s retinue, one Anakin Skywalker: after that, everything began to run together into one long blur of trouble and calamity, until finally the whole galaxy seemed to go entirely mad - yet, though certain of those more momentous events most certainly would not have happened precisely as they fell out, without his actions and occasional deliberate personal intervention in the unfolding of events, he is quite certain that he will be able to maintain to his dying day, with a perfectly clear conscience, that all that he has done and all that he has acted in prevention of has all been in pursuit of the greatest possible good and all in accordance with the will and nature of the Force, which ever supports the proliferation and the prosperity of life.
12.) Vision: An awesome and terrifying dream he had, mere days before Qui-Gon Jinn returned to the Temple from Telos IV with Xanatos Áediah Valdís Adi-Ai-Aiji in tow - a young human man, dark of hair and blue of eyes and pale of skin, standing with a human seeming youth with luminously pale skin, eyes like oceans, and hair like the corona of a rising or setting sun. They are together in the center of the Council Chamber, side by side, like Master and Padawan. The boy turns to look at the man and, at a nodding smile from him, opens his hands, where they have been folded serenely together, hidden by the long drape of full sleeves of his outer robe . . . and a light erupts from him, terrible and wondrous and awful, so pure and white as to seem positively unearthly, exploding outwards in a shockwave of blinding brightness radiating in all directions, accelerating with incomprehensible speed out across the whole of the Temple complex and the city-world surrounding it, his view of events somehow altering to keep pace, first to show that devouring monster of light blossoming in the sky of the galaxy where Coruscant once was, as if a new heavenly body had been born there, and then to show it expanding, intensifying, a perfect and hideous sphere racing outwards to engulf first neighboring solar systems, then sectors, then regions, and, finally, the whole of the known galaxy and more, a tremendous, horrible rush of whiteness, of Light, spilling out into the seemingly empty spaces separating this galaxy from its neighbors, the effect so horrifying that he wakes himself with a strangled cry, eyes blinded by the memory of light, before the vision can finish unfolding to its end - and, though Xanatos smiled up at him with genuine warmth when Qui-Gon brought him before the High Council, nonetheless, he would still recognize in the boy before him the young man from his dream, and know at once that he must not just act but be willing to do whatever it might take, to ensure that the vision should not be able to come to pass, so that he can save the Order and the Republic and the galaxy at large from a fate so frightful that evidently even when caught in the midst of a far-sight vision his mind still cannot bear to truly see it.
13.) Fate: It is and is not an easy matter, to alter the shape of someone’s natural fate, especially given that visions of the future are as often as not brought about by the efforts of those who are attempting to thwart what they have seen (their actions working against them, to cause the very things they so dread); yet, by combining one’s understanding of the far future with such things as an individual’s potential shatterpoints and innate weaknesses and the sure knowledge of how an individual can best fit together with another to create a stronger whole (and, thus, how to keep such an individual from entering into the kind of rapport where such a greater whole can and will form), it is possible, by many (relatively small and mostly subtle) acts of deliberate sabotage and manipulation, to divert a being away from one path and usher them onto another one altogether, especially when care has been taken to change that individual’s closest companions on such a life’s journey.
14.) Innocent: Although it doubtlessly would’ve been the safest course to take and should by all means have made his terrifying vision of the future an impossibility, because the boy comes to him an innocent, he does not simply kill him outright; yet, because he is a Jedi and because he is devoted to the continuation of the Jedi Order, so that the Republic can remain properly protected, always, he does quite deliberately set out to ruin all possibility of Xanatos having a successful future in the Jedi Order, permitting his training to proceed at an accelerated rate, to stoke his ego high, and then arranging to make him Padawan to a Master wholly unfit to check the growth of that ego or to rein in the boy’s almost obsessive drive for perfection in all things . . . including a very personal code of honor in glaring contrast to the selfless code of conduct required of a Jedi, one all but guaranteed to eventually cause an explosive and irreconcilable conflict between the boy’s individual sense of morality and justness and his Master’s inflexible belief in obeying the will of the Force in all things.
15.) Good: He truly does believe that the Force provides for those who are willing to recognize (and, if necessary, seek out) its bounty, for in the very presentment of his problem is a solution to the matter, just waiting to be found: Qui-Gon Jinn is a deeply good being and an all but perfect Jedi Knight; yet, at the very heart of his greatest strengths also lie his greatest weaknesses, the flaws and potential shatterpoints capable of making him do truly terrible things, in the name of the Force and his own conviction that he, as a Jedi, must ever obey its will - for example, with a connection the Living Force far greater than any other seen in the living memory of all Jedi, save Yoda, the Force is, to Qui-Gon, a constant murmuring presence, informing and guiding all present choices, all possible actions, silent on no one immediately probable matter, making it possible for him to effortlessly live in the moment of the now and to know that he is acting in accordance to the will of the Force . . . and also making it possible for him to assume (seemingly logically, to him, but in fact quite wrongly) that he knows all there is that is worth knowing of the Force and its will, simply because he can sense what the Force may be willing from moment to moment in the ever changing instant of the present, and that the will of the Force in the past and the voices of the possible, probable futures hold neither meaning nor wisdom nor true import and so need be paid no mind whatsoever; similarly, the will to do good and to be good, to obey the Jedi Code and the unwritten laws of conduct within the Order, to protect the sentient beings of the galaxy by upholding the laws and government of the Republic and obeying the will of the Force, to successfully complete missions given out by the High Council and to obey the given word of the Grand Master and others who are higher in the Order’s hierarchy than Qui-Gon, himself, including his own Master, Dooku, while on the one hand fitting Qui-Gon with a zestful will to always do as a Jedi should and an unwavering determination to fulfill the Force’s will and safeguard the good beings of the galaxy, also inclines him to a certain zealous fanaticism about conforming to the rules and teachings that he perceives as being in line with the true will of the Force, meaning that he might obey a certain teaching of his Master fanatically, out of the notion that this one particular act is in accordance with the will of the Force, while also choosing to occasionally disregard the orders of the Grand Master and/or High Council, if he perceives that such a command is at odds with his own notion of the workings of the Jedi Code or the current will of the Force; and, perhaps worst of all, while his conviction can surely stand as a testament to the strength of his character, it can also lead to the kind of blind self-righteousness that all too often leads to the trap of hypocrisy - and it is this that makes him such a good and useful tool, for the destruction of others who are dangerous, as his very conviction and earnest will to serve the Force can be used against him to make him quite blind to the fact that he is both being used as a tool to tear down others and being led by his own stubborn sense of self-righteousness into acts of destructive hypocrisy.
16.) Pity: It is a shame that the Jedi Order no longer permits romantic attachments among its members, for Dooku and Qui-Gon balance in such a way that, were they permitted to truly be together and to remain together, their disparate pieces fitting together to create a new and greater whole, it is unlikely that either their personal weaknesses or their individual strengths could be easily used against them: it is regrettable that Qui-Gon should be the most useful tool at hand for the breaking of one so dangerous, when that one is also naturally meant to be the Padawan of his own former Master: it is a terrible pity that Xanatos should be fated to become Master to one capable of destroying the whole of the galaxy as it is currently known; yet, unfortunately, no matter how much it means he must hurt Dooku or Qui-Gon or Xanatos or indeed any other being or beings, it does not change the fact that his duty, as a Jedi and as Grand Master of the Order, clearly is to do whatever it takes stop the conflagration seen in his vision from ever happening, no matter what the cost, either to himself (by means of his flayed conscience) or to others.
17.) Control: It breaks his heart as nothing else yet has done, to meet Obi-Wan and see the terrible, awesome light within him and to know that he has no choice but to do everything in his power to extinguish that light, to douse it before it can ever become possible that it might escape the boy’s control and so swallow the galaxy whole; yet, because he is Yoda and because it is his duty and he chose this life of duty when he chose to be sent out from the People into the larger galaxy, to serve the light in his own way and to carve out a life for himself separate from that defined by his inescapable limitations and defects, he forces himself to do it, raising the boy up to trust him utterly . . . and then betraying him by seeing to it that he will be apprenticed to none other than Qui-Gon Jinn, the worst possible overall choice to fit with that boy and be his Master.
18.) Dim: True inner light, it seems, is a damnably hard thing to extinguish - treachery can weaken it: betrayal can dim it: violent emotion of a dark enough tenor mixed with true pain of the boy and agony of the spirit can cause it to flicker; yet, love, it seems, however unearned or unwelcome or undeserved by its recipients, has miraculous restorative properties - and so, even though he has seen to the destruction of the boy’s intended Master and paired him with a Knight unfit to Master him, in the process of both all but destroying most of the true goodness of the nature of that Knight and thoroughly alienating from him the only individual capable of restoring that basic goodness of nature, unfortunately, it seems that Obi-Wan remains a potential source for galaxy-shaking change and destruction, and so he finds that he must continue to frequently monitor the young one and constantly take more and more and even more steps to see to it that the energy and intensity and prevalence of that inner light is and remains deeply undermined.
19.) Cipher: He has always been fond of Dooku, even though he’s also always known that the boy could potentially be quite dangerous (his very unpredictability making him dear to Yoda); Qui-Gon’s rebellions he’s generally found to be sources of private amusement, like the antics of a clever but stubborn child; Obi-Wan, though . . . Obi-Wan is both a vergence and a nexus of the Force, his inner light apparently inextinguishable, even after the supposed childhood sickness that left him so altered and an apprenticeship so uneven and so difficult that it nearly left him broken in spirit (the potential in him is still enormous, as proven by the all but miraculous feats he is able to accomplish with the Force, when under pressure), simultaneously sparking both unending awe and almost horrified fascination, and the very thought of that one with a living cipher like Anakin Skywalker (whose future is so cloudy and dim that he can see nothing of it clearly at all, no matter how many hours he spends meditating or how hard he tries to use far-sight to peer ahead at the boy’s future) is so very terrifying that only sheer necessity is enough to make him allow them to stay together.
20.) Teacher: There are, of course, some bright lights to help mediate the increasing darkness surrounding him: the younglings, for one, always manage to brighten his day and lighten his burdens, and, being primarily a teacher at heart, he does his best to always visit with and look after and help to instruct the younger generations, who are (in the main) still so very innocent.
21.) Throne: Bail Organa should have been a Jedi, to be sure (in his estimation, the man would have been a great Jedi Master, quite possibly even as great as or greater than some of his fellows currently serving on the High Council), but it’s so very entertaining, to watch the consternation that follows, among the power brokers and the monied interests of the so-called special interest groups, in the wake of the change he so effortlessly constantly sows among the politicians he works with, that Yoda finds himself whole-heartedly approving of that maniac Jorus C’baoth’s decision to make Organa the proper heir apparent to the Alderaanian throne, especially given how very badly the need for a good man like Organa in the Senate seems to be, nowadays.
22.) Late: Though he does not figure it out until much later, the truth is that the Force had already been darkening, access to its purity of power becoming harder and more limited, more restricted, even when he was first beginning to learn about what it was that he was tapping in to, whenever he’d reach out to touch, draw on, and manipulate one of the shining skeins of energy that make up its ebbs and flows; yet, since it was always a seeming fact of its nature from the time when he first understood that what he was sensing and using was the Force, it took the thoughts/beliefs, fears, and eventual assertions of many others who’d come to observe the trend only dimly in their shorter lifespans to eventually convince him that the phenomenon was something real, something important enough to be worth exploring, something quite possibly not natural . . . a fact for which he eventually blames much of his inability to truly perceive the very real danger posed by the Sith until it was basically already far too late.
23.) Adjust: The Jedi Order has already had over a century - a full lifetime, for most Jedi (if they are lucky and avoid death in battle or otherwise on active duty, while on some mission or another) - to adjust to the Ruusan Reformations, by the time he’s joined it, and so it does not seem to really change or fossilize/degenerate, to him, so much as it merely just seems to steadily, inevitably, become more of itself, more and more set in its ways and firmly united behind its rules and usual manner of doing things (and of being, as it were), and perhaps that is why it never really occurs to him that something may be wrong about the way that the Order is organized and run or that the increasing lack of adaptability and flexibility within both the Order itself and its individual members is in any way detrimental to either the Order or the Republic.
24.) Failure: To be honest, Yoda did notice the Order’s dwindling numbers, after a couple of centuries of working within its bounds, but he spent the next few centuries quietly trying to think of what it could mean, for the Order, if the trend were to continue, rather than acting about it directly, and the next few centuries quietly trying to think of why the slow but steady drop in numbers was occurring, in the first place, and if the trend was some kind of temporary natural phenomenon or something caused by an outside force that could be treated, and the next few centuries trying to arrive at the most ideal means by which to fix it without fundamentally altering the nature of the Order, and the one actual attempt he made, in all that time, to do something to address those dwindling numbers ended in failure, with the Chu’unthor being abandoned and the mobile praxeum program scuttled, and so he’s still unsuccessfully trying to come up with some kind of workable plan of action to reverse the trend without having to actually change the rules and traditions of the Order when the Sith begin to come out of hiding and to make their move to conquer the known galaxy and destroy the Order completely.
25.) Stagnant: That he - a being sent out into the galaxy for being curious and different and changeful and too unlike the People to abide with them - should be set in his ways and dangerously stagnant of thought and purpose is, frankly, a thought that never occurs to him, just as it never occurs to him that he (as the most widely celebrated and renown member of the Jedi Order - the very face of the Jedi Order, for so many, that he is taken to embody/symbolize the whole of the Order, in his very being - and the formal head of the whole Order) could possibly be so controlled by a darker emotion of his that it could deceive him into believing that none of his actions were even so much as influenced by, much less wholly decided by, that sense of fear.
26.) Bother: He has access to all of the Order’s vast stores of knowledge, to records that (though being badly fragmented and lamentably incomplete) easily go back far enough to describe the not only the pre-Ruusan ways but the Order as it was in its relative youth, back when the Republic itself was still very young; yet, because he finds the records indicative of chaos and confusion and those so young as to still be learning how to learn, not an Order in its smoothly functioning, peaceful, prosperous prime, free (or at least relatively free) of inner struggles and dogmatic war with Dark Jedi and Sith, he assumes that the old ways were all fundamentally flawed and set aright only after Ruusan, and so doesn’t bother to even consider pursuing those changes to the Order (either the true reasons for them or their actual repercussions) any further.
27.) Strange: He can sense that there is something just a little bit . . . odd . . . about the Supreme Chancellor, but then, the man is from Naboo, after all, and that world routinely seems to spawn strange and unusual and wonderfully unique individuals (which is precisely why the Order would love to be able to convince the good people of Naboo to send more than, say, maybe one or two of its strong Force-sensitive children to the Temple every three or four hundred years or so to be trained), many of them quite strong in the Force, and so he simply assumes that what he’s almost but not quite sensing is either just a mark of the man’s own particular kind of oddness of else nothing more than an illusion of weirdness based on the fact that, as a Nabooian, he really ought to be more unique than he actually is and less like all the other conniving politicians scattered throughout the galaxy.
28.) Disaster: He thinks, at first, that the Battle of Geonosis may be the most horrible thing he’s ever had to witness; unfortunately, though, he is wrong: the war is one rapid shock to the system after another, the blows all falling so closely together that he feels as though there’s not time to even breathe, much less attempt to recover or process what has been happened, in between each disaster, each atrocity, and the Force is so clogged up with pain and terror and rage that it’s next to impossible to touch it without coming away feeling as if one’s just been bathed both in the battlefield emotions of the killing and the dying and in the putrefying cesspools of vile madness that exist in place of souls within those who have been locked away for being of danger to both other sentient beings and themselves.
29.) Hero: He nearly had Dooku, on Geonosis (would have had him, he cannot help but think, if not for Skywalker, who had gone charging in blindly, alone, letting his anger guide his actions instead of the Force, and nearly gotten his Master killed in the process, giving Dooku the opening he needed to put them both in such a vulnerable position that Yoda could not, in good conscience, continue to press the fight with Dooku, when it was clear that Obi-Wan and Anakin could not move quickly enough to save themselves), and he is quite sure that he would have had him, on Vjun (again, if not for Skywalker, rushing in and ruining everything, all of that time and effort towards showing Dooku that it was still possible for him to return home thrown away like so much rubbish, when the boy came bursting in to the house, thinking of nothing but chasing after Asajj Ventress and not caring that his presence instantly made Dooku suspect a trap), so, even though the galactic media seem determined to make Anakin Skywalker their golden boy and darling, right along with his Master (a fact that does not bother him nearly so much. No. Obi-Wan not only truly deserves the accolades, he does not want them, which, in Yoda’s mind, translates directly into his fitness for receiving them), he cannot help but suspect that this war would be better off, in the long run, without the so-called Hero With No Fear always blundering about into the thick of things.
30.) Pattern: The former Queen of Naboo and now Senator for the Chommell Sector somehow or another keeps entangling herself in the missions of the Jedi, and, while at first he simply assumes that it is the work and will of the Force that keeps throwing her into the company of Jedi, when the pattern doesn’t just continue but violently escalates during the war, he begins to have suspicions regarding the woman’s intentions and to wonder if, for the sake of the war effort, he shouldn’t be trying to at least temporarily discourage her from continuing to work so closely with certain members of the Jedi Order . . . especially after he notices the way she is looking after the Team, after yet another one of those odd involvements, as if she cannot quite make up her mind which one (Kenobi or Skywalker) she wishes to devour first.
31.) Prison: Though he generally has visions of one sort or another when he slides deeply enough into meditation, he does not often dream, so he is shocked for many reasons (perhaps the least of which is that he is dreaming of a man he knows is dead) when he dreams, one night, of waking in his chamber to find an oddly familiar looking young human man (with shockingly pale skin and deeply black hair, full red lips pressed into a flat line of displeasure, bright blue eyes so dark that they almost appear black) standing over him, shaking his head, overlong hair sliding forward to curtain his eyes, voice pitched low as he warns, “If Obi-Wan is hurt in any way because of your fearful small-mindedness and sheer inability to see what is standing right in front of you, I swear by all the stars in all the night skies of all the ’verses in existence that I will find a way to get out of this damned prison solely to hunt you down and make you wish that you had never been born, Yoda.”
32.) Dark: The revelation that he has been behaving, essentially, as a Dark Jedi - a corrupting influence on his beloved Order, blinded by arrogance, driven by his fear and anger to act in ways conducive to an environment of pain and hatred and suffering, his status as the most venerable member of the whole Jedi Order so thoroughly established, over his long centuries of life, that it had become impossible for anyone to ever criticize him (however badly he might have needed it) without sounding blasphemous or even traitorous to both the Order and the Republic. Ironically, in his many long years of service to the Order and to the Republic, he had become so widely regarded as vital and an infallible leader that, as with Chancellor Palpatine, no one ever dared to question him until it was almost too late. His darkness, like Palpatine’s, had been allowed to exist virtually unchallenged, out of blind trust and fear, until finally it could no longer be borne, the Force itself seemingly rising up against him, primarily by way of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker - is so crushing that he finds it difficult to think, next to impossible to truly take in all that is happening, and virtually impossible to know what he should be feeling about it all, much less how he should be reacting.
33.) Taint: Afterwards, Yoda isn’t really sure which among all of the recent occurrences is actually more shocking - learning that Palpatine is the Sith Master Sidious and what he was planning (and how his schemes have been thwarted); feeling Obi-Wan and Anakin join forces to cleanse the Force utterly of the taint that’s built up on it from the proliferation of the so-called Dark Side; learning what those two and those two seemingly impossible Force spirits have planned, both for the Order and the Republic; or finding out how very wrong he’s been about so many things he’s taken for granted for so very long, in his life - yet, whatever the right answer to that particular conundrum may be, he has a feeling that decades, perhaps even centuries, have been shaved off of his life, from all of these shocks, and that nothing and no one, least of all his own diminutive self, is ever going to be the same again . . . particularly not when it is becoming increasingly apparent that he has been huddled in the dark mantle of his own fear for so long and done so much evil and wrong in his life to others (often to those for whom he should have been willing to lay down his life, rather than allowing himself to harm them, as he has, due to his status as the Grand Master) that he owes several individuals an extended apology and attempt at making reparations, even though it is not particularly likely that he will be allowed to remain in this New Jedi Bendu Order long enough to do either, given the nature of some his crimes and those they have been against . . .