Session export: A Meddle and a Lark
It was the infinite edge of an endless world, where water fell up and sense fell down, and two men were having a slap fight.
Something cosmic about that, thought the creature watching them, kicking their broken legs over a open drop into a sky that tasted like the echo of ash that remembered being a tree upon a hill, once, and smelled like a starship engine. Each spoke of pain as the wheel of their ball-joint hop turned was a spike in their spine, and still they kept kicking. It was only bones. Calcium and carbon. It was only neurons leaping chasms leaping rivers dancing lightyears.
Weren’t they getting tired out there? Looked tiring. Boring.
But then, they were the only other people she’d ever seen in this place, and that, that was interesting.
The creature stood on shattered fibulas and turned to look upon the nebula that stretched behind them. And right and left and up and down. And that way too, past the gentlemen ripping apart floating islands with their minds, flying, and generally trying to kill each other. It went on forever, here. Oh, there would be echoes of cities at times, ghosts and mists and Goddess knew what, but it just kept going. And going. And going.
They didn’t care about infinity. They had debts to collect.
Sighing, the creature stuck her knife through reality and squeezed herself back through the crack under the door.
The blonde man was there again.
Not the same place. Not the same time. Neither existed here like they did on the other side. But the dark-haired one was gone, and this one remained.
He carried a tempest around him like a morose raincloud. It drowned continents. Ripped open planets. Darkened stars. Sometimes nearby it she couldn’t speak because it turned her voice to thunder. And there he was in the epicenter, a wind-torn dandelion, screaming and raging for someone to come back.
Yeah, she thinks. Me too.
And she leaves him to burn himself out.
Only, he doesn’t.
The thing about this place is that it’s hard to measure. It nags at the scientist in her. She can’t quantify it, barely qualify. Screaming feels like sleeping. The Force is alive, the body is dead, none of it matters. What’s a caliper to a caterpillar? Nonsense.
She sways with her flask in hand and watches the man brood. It has to be brooding. He’s too quiet not to be. Just standing there. Not blinking. Eyes will get dry like that. Oh, there’s no starving here but your eyes still get bloody dry. The eye of the hurricane is above him. It is very quiet.
Maybe he’s broken.
Maybe she cares.
Maybe if she pokes the rancor, it’ll bite.
The creature traverses a star system or two and hops down out of a tree with memories for leaves and stares at him, walking in circles around and around again, up close for once. Could probably grow mushrooms on him. He’s still enough.
There’s pebbles here, another cosmic joke. She picks one up and throws it at his head.
“Hey. Hey, mate. Ya blink while you think, or ye eyeballs gonna stink.” Her nose wrinkled. “Juvenile rhyme, but it still works fine. Hey, you hear me?”
The man doesn’t even flinch.
In a long and agonizing moment that feels like forever, the tempest around him didn’t even flicker.
Then, the physical form he occupies moves as he turns his neck to face the catalyst. Not with the fluid motions expected of a human but an unnatural heavy mechanical motion of massive tectonic plates shifting into a new position and reshaping a world.
His eyes, an unnatural emerald hue and bloodshot from nearly a decade of not needing to blink settle themselves on the creature near him. Yet he doesn’t see a person. He only sees a disruption in the infinite current of the Force tempest.
“Ma–” was the only sound his dry raspy voice could generate in a tone that sounded like the tectonic plates shifting earlier were grinding together after a lifetime of stillness.
His eyes don’t meet those of the creature but rather look through her.
Searching for the Grand Master that should be standing there.
His enemy.
His purpose.
It was clear the words the creature spoke to him had not been comprehended by his mind. The words met his mind like absolute gibberish. The man had been communicating only with the language of the Force that even Basic was a foreign dialect to him.
For years the only other in his entire existence had been a combatant. His mind had no way to comprehend or process a non-hostile entity.
His enemy.
His purpose.
He looks to the pebble, he does not remember it hitting him, only a rippled memory in the Force a lifetime ago. Yet it happened, a fascinating new glitch in the nightmare that was his only reality. A glitch that made his mind wander away from the only anchor it knew. The only thing that helped the man stay grounded. Where he ended and the infinite void around him began.
“Stone,” the man found his voice. A verbal acknowledgement of an observation as he processed his current existence as if stepping into a new world.
A creature, a stone, and a tempest.
The man’s mind was cold and analytical, and his tone hollow as he addressed the creature. “In this place made of thoughts and shadows, where nothing is truly heavy, you choose to give a stone purpose. Why?”
“Answered your own question there, didn’t you, Man of Thoughts and Shadows? I chose. I could have thrown a knife at you if you liked. Or a peanut. Maybe spat? Yes, a stone. Could have been the loam, or a bone.”
Curious just to see if he was capable of moving again after that great effort, if continents could counterclockwise turn like articulated doll heads, they danced back around to his other side, a few steps off where he’d been staring, looking for no one and nothing. “I choose, so I give meaning, so I have meaning. Savvy? And I mean to mean something quite mean to those I mean to.”
.
When the weirdo returned to staring off, seeming to forget about them as they muttered to themselves, the Changeling shrugged and backed away, tossing stones about their hands.
“Well, Why-Stone, I bid thee good hearth, good health, good wishes. Perhaps you will find a whyfor, no?”
With that, they cut their way through reality and stepped through the fissure of a door.
.
The next time she saw him was…another time. The same place, but also a new place, and no place, and they had eyes but eyes had never once existed, and her still they are and do made themselves.
“Would you like me to kill you?” inquired the creature that next time. “It might be refreshing compared to all the staring and screaming.”
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