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The Park, Friday Morning

The medic had freed Atton from his kolto bath again on Thursday morning. Another full day of observation, and he was good to go, with a bunch of patches in his pocket and an abdomen that still hurt if he bent the wrong way.

And then Mical had put him on the Ebon Hawk and sent him back to Fandom. (The Hawk was to make a point: stay there, don't come back. Otherwise Mical would've just kicked him through a portal.)

He wasn't planning to stay there. Not for long. Not with Mira out there, dealing with this problem that Atton was beginning to suspect was bigger than they'd anticipated.

He didn't bother to go back to the apartment - he didn't want to run the risk of running into Sparkle just yet - but stumbled down the stairs and walked down to the park.

That alone was probably more exercise than he should've given himself. He winced at the sound of his own breath as he sank down on a bench.

Space.

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Atton shrugged. "Take all of this with a grain of salt," he said. "I hate kids, and at the age all these Jedi kids were being trained, I was running around the slums of Alderaan while my non-Jedi parents managed to do a number on me anyway."

"When did you know you were Force-sensitive?" Kaidan asked, "Or were you, even then?" Realizing how that sounded, he explained. "In my galaxy, we have people with meta-human abilities, but it all comes from exposure to a rare element. It's identifiable on a DNA scan, and humans..well, they keep an eye on any women of childbearing age within a blast radius, if there is one. They pretty much know when one is born."

"You're born with Force sensitivity, but only the Jedi can really tell if a kid has it or not," Atton said. "I wouldn't have been the first kid that got skipped over. Space, that's what the current Order is made of."

He blew out a plume of smoke. "I didn't know until I was about 21."

"I heard there was some sort of blood test," Kaidan mentioned.

"Sure, but only the Jedi administer it," Atton said lightly. "And they usually only take you when you're really young."

"But by the time you found out, there'd already been Revan's purge?" Kaidan guessed.

"He was in the middle of it," Atton said, "And I wasn't about to shout it off the rooftops."

The best lies weren't lies at all.

"What, you didn't immediately snatch a lightsaber out of the ether and jump into the thick of battle?" Kaidan asked wryly, "I mean, that sounds less than a good plan to me, but also totally a Jedi thing to do."

"Depends on the Jedi," Atton said lightly. "I didn't get involved in any of this until I happened to trip over the last survivor of all the purges."

Yeah, multiple.

"Revan attacked the temples," Kaidan extrapolated, "Not just ..whatever passes for Jedi government."

If Atton had tripped over the last survivor.. Revan had gone after them wholesale. He'd likely killed the kids.

Atton had, essentially, tripped over the Caleb of his time.

Good guess. Too bad it was wrong.

"Revan never completed his purge," Atton said. "His second-in-command, Malak, tried to after he got brainwashed, but he didn't succeed either."

He eyed his cigarette for a moment.

"But they destabilised the Jedi governing structure enough that when Nihilus came around and started eating entire planets because there were Jedi on them, well..."

Edited 2018-07-22 20:55 (UTC)

Well, that was something. At least Revan hadn't gone into a Jedi temple and started hacking Padawans apart, ANAKIN.

The name caused Kaidan to pause a moment, "Nihlus? No, can't be."

Nah, Revan just gathered hundreds of thousands of largely young soldiers onto one planet and then blew the whole thing up.

"Can't be the same guy," Atton said. "Wears a mask, eats things?"

"Turian SPECTRE," Kaidan said, "They have chitinous faces that sometimes look like masks, but.. no, if you saw him eating, it wasn't the same guy. Turians require a dextro-amino based diet. The food humans eat would have been potentially deadly." He snorted softly after a moment, "If our galaxy had any sort of analog to the Jedi.. probably the SPECTRES."

All the more amusing, considering he was one.

"Yeah, Nihilus ate Force users," Atton deadpanned. "SPECTRES, huh? I guess that's a scarier name than 'Jedi', so props to the marketing department."

"It stands for Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. Don't blame me, I don't pick the names. They're agents charged with protecting galactic stability by any means necessary," Kaidan explained wryly. He hated the name. He hated labels of any kind. This one, though, made him more itchy than most.

"Definitely not my Nihlhus," he agreed, "Ate them like a cannibal or just sucked the power out of them until they died?"

He'd known creatures that could do both.

"That last one, technically. Like I said, sometimes to whole planets at a time," Atton said.

He stubbed his cigarette out on the metal edge of the bench. "Sounds like someone really wanted an acronym," he said. "What're they like?"

"One person did that?" Kaidan frowned. Creepy. Definitely creepy.

"SPECTRES? They're all different. Different races, different abilities, different methods. Some are heroes, some are assholes, some see things in black and white while others have a spectrum gradient of gray." Kaidan considered it for a moment and shrugged a shoulder, "First human SPECTRE was Commander Shepard. The guy who gave his life to save the galaxy. You think I'm a boyscout - he'd have made your teeth hurt. He was the best person I've ever known in my life, and there are about four entire species in my galaxy that would say the same thing about him. He was pretty much a paragon of all that is good and right and just in the universe. Kind of sickening, really, except that he was also very human, with all the faults a regular guy can have. The second human SPECTER is kind of a dick." He shrugged a shoulder, "That's not saying much. One of the Turian SPECTREs was the kind of guy I'd follow into any battle, because he was that kind of leader. Another one.. I think he was like your Sith. He started off with a purpose, but after indoctrination, his purpose twisted. It was like he couldn't see, or didn't care, about the cost of achieving his goals."

"In the end, he tried to fight it. He remembered who and what he was," Kaidan finished, "Ate his gun to stop being a threat, when he realized his will was about to be broken."

"Yeah, sometimes Sith Lords have weird, creepy powers that really mess up people's days, because conquering the galaxy just isn't enough," Atton said, and then fell silent to listen for a moment.

"So... indoctrination by who?"

"Well, don't they just sound like a barrel of fun," Kaidan frowned, "Is that what happens when Jedi go dark? They suddenly get the urge for galactic conquest?"

He thought about it for a moment about the answer to the indoctrination question. "We called them Reapers. They were a mix of organic and inorganic life, and they were massive. The smallest recorded was about 150 meters, the largest, around 2000 meters. If there's more data, it was lost during the war. They had an ability to subtly infiltrate a being's mind and warp it, everything from just making the being an agreeable pawn to outright domination, where everything was wiped away and all that was left was a meatsuit puppet. They were also cyclical, kind of like the war cycles you described. About every 50,000 years, they'd come out of dark space and consume all advanced life in the galaxy. They called it 'harvesting'. Then they'd go back to dark space and wait for the primitive forms they'd left to evolve."

He took a breath, and said shortly, "Reapers are now an extinct species."

"Great. Giant aliens that do mind control. Now I'm going to have nightmares for years," Atton opined.

He ran a hand through his hair. "But yeah, Dark Jedi? They're all nuts, in one way or another. Some become sadistic murderers, others decide to take over the galaxy, or lock themselves up in a library full of crazy buzzing Sith holocrons until they've got crazy flowing out the ears..."

Not that he knew anybody like that.

"You did ask," Kaidan noted dryly, "though, like I said, they're extinct. At least, in my reality." There was, after all, Liara and Tali's. And wasn't that just a thought to keep him up at night.

"Do they ever get sane again, the Sith? Have any of them ever walked away from it without someone raping their brain?"

He was starting to get a better handle on Kanan's fear.

"Yeah, sometimes," Atton said vaguely. (He wasn't going to give Anakin up, and his own story was more complicated than that.) "But it takes a lot of work. Coming back from it.. and stopping it. I knew one Jedi who cut herself off from the Force just to stop herself from tumbling over the edge into the Dark Side."

"It is possible, is what you're saying," Kaidan said as though filing that away, because he was. "That's something."

He wasn't sure what, but it was definitely something.

"Sure," Atton said, shrugging. "I mean, it's not going to bring back the hundreds of thousands of people that someone like Revan killed by that point, but yeah, sure, it's possible."

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