Before - Legends Jedi Snapshots *New story 15/06/06* 'These Boots Were Made For Walking'

I vote for It Started With a Kiss. Her response was rather amusing.

 

Lol, I don't mind if it's one of mine or not - but I'm open to suggestions! Any ideas: just PM me.

 

Ack, we never did submit, did we? ::Smacks forehead.::

 

You're right Ish! I'm sure Jem sent something in though.

At least I hope so!

 

We can hope, though Swings and Roundabouts wasn't excerpted and we won.

 

Don't worry, Jem did put something in for this one. I can't remember which one she chose, but there's been a lot going on over here the past few days, so please excuse the lapse of memory.

 

Ah, k. I'll be putting up my response to the new challenge after lunch.

 

Excerpts were sent in on time, never fear! I hope they are acceptable to all. Editing is not something I enjoy: I don't mind trimming the odd word but hacking away at something just depresses me. In the end I chose pieces that fitted as near as possible to the 900 word limit, and in the end it coloured my decisions on which pieces to use. So, if we don't win, it's all my fault!

Bet you thought you'd never hear that from someone whose namesake is Corellian!

 

LOL. I'm currently writing G'emela for the first time and having a hard time of it.

 

Title: Foundling, Part 1/3
Timeframe: Long time before ANH
Characters: Qui-Gon, G'emela, Obi-Wan
Summary: How Obi-Wan came to the Temple.
*****
"This isn't a mission. It's...it's..."

"An honor?"

"It's..."

"A necessary service to the Republic?"

"It's..."

"An exciting opportunity?"

"NANNYING!"

Qui-Gon was fighting to keep a smile from his face, but taking one look at the way his Padawan was cracking her knuckles made the task nearly impossible.

G'emela was a devoted Jedi and an excellent apprentice, but her idea of what constituted the activities of a "proper Jedi" were something of an amusement over the years. She had declared on her first day of training that dishpan hands were not the trademark of a proper Jedi, so she couldn't be expected to pitch in after dinner. He'd thought he'd been fortunate enough to take on a Padawan with a sense of humor.

It turned out she was deadly serious.

Over the years, her perceptions had thankfully changed and matured, thanks to discipline, training and a healthy dose of custodial punishment, but she still looked on many things as wholly too jocund for the Jedi lifestyle.

Apparently, the solemn and noble duty of retrieving a child for entrance into the Temple was one of these things.

"Calm yourself, my young apprentice," Qui-Gon chided. "I won't make you change the whelp unless you persist in this line of conversation."

That shut her up, since he wasn't one to make threats of that sort idly, but the look she gave him reminded him very strongly of an unpleasant experience when he had been trapped before a charging bantha while wearing a red tunic.

"As it is," he continued, "we won't know if the child is to come with us until we have tested him. You may not have to mind him at all."

That seemed to inspire a degree of relief.

"However," he concluded, "I will then have to recommend to the Council that we be sent on more of these missions, since all Padawans should be well-versed in the Temple's admissions procedures."

She adopted a pleasant smile but the gesture, coupled with the fire in her eyes, made her look like a Devaronian out for blood.

"The first rule of this sort of mission is that the child must not be frightened of us," Qui-Gon explained. "I would suggest that you make that achievement your goal for the day."

They rode in relative silence from that moment on, though he heard frustrated hisses of breath as she practiced her pleasant, amiable face in her pocket mirror and found herself to look neither pleasant nor amiable.

The word formidable was what was most used to describe her in polite company. Qui-Gon most often called her strong-willed or, when pressed by the subject herself, proclaimed her to be a "nice young woman of admirable determination."

Translation: One scary blighter you wouldn't want to cross and you didn't hear that from me.

This was not to say that she was not a talented girl who was a credit to the Jedi Order. It was simply to say that she was skilled as a negotiator because she could grandstand the most hardened terrorist into an early grave in five minutes flat. This was not the most terrifying thing, though.

The most terrifying thing was that she could just as quickly turn and affectionately mother you to death as have you hiding under a table.

Her training, therefore, had been something of a challenge. Qui-Gon could be hard-headed at time, but he was generally the type to follow Master Khafut's admonition to enact the duties of a Jedi with "gentleness, meekness, love unfeigned and a well-built lightsaber." This was a matter of frequent irritation to G'emela, who didn't particularly like diplomatic responses to her bold arguments.

"We're here," she pronounced shortly. "Seems we have a reception committee."

That wasn't entirely true. It was a fact that there was a growing number of people emerging from the remains of Huramek, the village that was their destination, but it was most likely the group of survivors rather than envoys.

According to the reports

 

Part 2 will be up tomorrow.

 

Fabulous start Ish!

I loved how they wanted to name him 'Found in Food'. Looking forward to the next part!

 

LOL, thanks, mouse. I figured it would be appropriate for SB...

 

Thanks, Leona.

 

Urgh, got caught up in too much and decided to kill off one of my other stories once and for all, so did that instead of this.

 

ROFLOL! I loved the description of G'emela. She is indeed a scary blighter! And yes, she can mother someone to death if she takes a liking to them. Poor Qui in particular!

Awww...little Obi! Poor kid. He's gone through a lot. Chumi-Wan! I really like that. It's a wonder G'emela never throws that back at him later when she finds out Qui has eventually taken him as his padawan. I wonder if Qui ever looks back on that day he first met Obi-Wan and wonders if the force meant for them to be together, especially when he so resolutely refused to take him to be his apprentice? I'll bet in hindsight it makes him smile!

Lol at G'emela wondering if she was going to have to deal with a screaming child. Looks like she'll get her way if the last sentence of the post is anything to go by! It's a wonder the poor boy isn't traumatised further at the sight of a Jedi robe: he'd probably associate it with being stabbed with a needle!

 

The World's Deadliest Bridesmaid
By Jemmiah

**********

He'd thought he'd been imagining it at first.

His sleep-addled brain alerted him to the repeated ringing of the door chime moments after the force had prompted him to waken up from the deep, peaceful sleep he'd been enjoying. Qui-Gon lay, eyes half-open, with his ears straining to catch the sound of the chime?

There it was again. Stabbed by a persistent and uncaring individual.

"If this is a joke by one of Obi-Wan's padawan friends," Qui-Gon growled to himself as he swung his legs over the bed, "they are going to live to regret the day they attempted such idiocy?"

Shrugging his arms into his long robe Qui-Gon stopped in the middle of the floor and tried to get a better picture of things in his own mind. The force quite clearly told him that Obi-Wan was happily sleeping through the din, which irked him completely. From outside the Jedi apartment block Qui-Gon allowed the force to reach out to the nuisance who was intent on ringing the chime until either their finger dropped off or the ringing mechanism ceased to function.

And now he had a pretty good idea who that individual was.

Tying his belt around him in frustrated, exaggerated fashion, Qui-Gon marched towards the door and, having taken a calming breath, allowed the door to slide back to reveal?

"Jemmiah."

The rather wan, pale-faced and piteous Corellian regarded Qui-Gon as if he were some unsurpassable barrier, which in many ways he was seeing as how he was standing blocking the doorway to his apartment.

"It's twenty minutes past two in the morning." Qui-Gon felt obliged to point out.

She didn't even acknowledge him, merely swayed unsteadily on her feet.

"You're drunk, aren't you?"

Jemmiah sighed.

"I can see that you are!" He put his hands out to steady her for fear that she would fall over. "I can smell it, too." He sniffed at her clothing, detecting the unmistakable odour of strong liquor on the fabric of her pale pink jacket and extremely scant dress. "Is that hooch I can detect?!?"

"How do you know what hooch smells like?" Jemmiah pouted, trying to tidy up the long chestnut strands that had escaped the pins woven into her hair, leaving her looking extremely bedraggled and worse for wear. "If you must know, I was at a wedding."

"That doesn't mean you have to get drunk!"

"I'm not drunk." Jemmy replied indignantly, looking longingly towards the empty couch in the living room. "Can I come in, please?"

"Why should I let you?" Qui-Gon folded his arms. "Given the way you're behaving?"

She looked up at him with confused, startled eyes. "Because I live here!" She answered in a tone that suggested he was a complete lunatic.

Qui-Gon didn't so much as blink. "No you don't. You live with Evla. Where you've lived permanently for the last five years."

Jemmiah tried to process that piece of information then dismissed it as immaterial.

"The ground is very unsteady at the moment. Are we experiencing a quake or something?"

"The ground is unsteady because you are on the point of collapse through alcoholic excess." Qui-Gon relented sufficiently to allow her to stagger into the apartment towards the couch. "And don't think that by allowing you in I'm condoning this behaviour! We will talk about this when you are in a fit enough condition to listen?"

"That might be some time." Jemmiah muttered, feeling her way across the room past the chairs and the table towards the much-desired couch. "Wookiees know how to party. And it was a pretty wonderful party, too. What I remember of it." She screwed up her face in the hope it might help her remember. "I vaguely recollect Mungo bundling me into an air cab?and then he sent me totally in the wrong direction, coz he'd had more to drink than me. Instead of the Jedi temple he sent me to some ruin on the other side of the planet?"

"The Saberine temple?" Qui-Gon frowned. "That is on the other side of the planet, near enough! How did you afford the fare back?"

Jemmiah squirmed uncomfor

 

First, I love finally getting some more info on Rela and her former alcoholism, since it's intrigued me since I started reading ANTAR. Second, on to your comments on part 1 of Foundling. I'm glad you liked the description of G'emela (I still think it's funny that her name means twin and Obi-Wan could probably justifiably call her his Evil Twin. I mostly got the characterization from Jemmy's Diary, expounding on the idea that she's a very Jedi version of my friend Priscilla, who is large, overprotective, and very, very Southern. Yes, poor Qui, but poor Obi more! I think G'emela would be the type to use Chumi-Wan, even if she ran into him at the age of 60. I liked this part for foreshadowing/proving them to be soul mates: "We found him in the kitchen," Uri-Len explained. "It had been three days since the event and we didn't expect to find anything, much less a survivor, but he had decided to deal with his grief by eating himself out of house and home." LOL, he's probably traumatized permanently by banthas.

 

World's Deadliest Bridesmaid

 

Foundling, Part 2
*****
By the time they got Obi-Wan to stop screaming every time one of them touched him, the rest of the villagers had helpfully decided to abandon their posts and let the Jedi deal with the child. This meant, however, that he had no familiar faces to comfort him after the blood-drawing procedure.

Truth be told, he drew more of their blood than they did his by the time they got him to respond to a Force-suggestion and stay still, and then Qui-Gon had the heartlessness to suggest that G'emela keep him distracted while Qui-Gon run the midichlorian test.

She had no idea what to distract him with until she found a cluster of julaberries in the cooling unit. She extended one and he warily took it, tapping it with one tiny finger as if in order to make sure the mean Jedi lady wouldn't make it explode. Then, he popped it in his mouth and grinned around a mouthful of seeds, extending his hand for more.

She used the Force to nudge another berry off the stem, then floated it into his waiting mouth. He nodded approvingly, then extended his hand again.

"Oh, no, Chumi-Wan," she muttered, "post-traumatic stress disorder or not, you'll have to work for this."

In a second, his mouth was empty and hanging expectantly open, but she had set the cluster on the floor between them, picking each one off the stem and leaving them in a careful row. He looked first as if he were about to scold her, then as if he were about to use tears as a bargaining tool. Perhaps it was then that he realized she wouldn't be swayed by either, so he simply glowered.

And then, he held out a hand, beckoning slightly, and one of the berries rolled towards him.

"Are you watching this?" she stage-whispered to Qui-Gon.

"Of course," he replied in kind, eyes on the child. "Try something other than food."

She retrieved the cylindrical commlink from her belt and placed it before the julaberries, then moved her fingers in a slight rocking motion, sending the commlink towards and away from Obi-Wan before stopping it to see if he would respond.

His face screwed up in an expression of long-suffering and he repeated the movement, then flicked his hand. Immediately, the commlink rolled to the side and he lunged forward, claiming the julaberries as his reward for cooperating with such silly games.

"Ah," Qui-Gon observed. "Well, I think you've discovered the secret to his training."

"Which is?" she queried.

"Leave a bit of comestible compensation at the end of the task and he'll achieve the impossible."
*****
"His midichlorian levels are well above average," Qui-Gon reported to Master Yoda, "and his skills are appropriate for a boy his age."

"Affected him, has the disaster at his home?"

"He seems..." Qui-Gon grimaced at the memory of three minutes of uninterrupted screeching. "...Wary of strangers. He didn't resist the villagers because he had seen them before, but when we tried to approach him alone, he fairly panicked."

"A common affliction this is," Yoda said dismissively, though Qui-Gon could hear a hint of amusement in the old troll's voice. "Adapt well, he will, if to believed, your report is."

"Yes, Master," Qui-Gon said dutifully. "We will be departing this evening, in that case."

He returned to find G'emela pinned beneath Obi-Wan's sleeping form, her hand waving vaguely as she summoned objects with the Force. Upon closer inspection, they turned out to be biscuits.

Apparently, Obi-Wan was not the only young Jedi in need of comfort food. Reaching out, he snagged two from the pile and resumed his seat.

"Our work here is finished."

 

ROFLOL at the way G'emela made Chumi-Wan 'work' for his food! Poor little thing! No wonder he's wary of strangers. And no wonder Qui-Gon calls him 'termite' later in life! I'll bet Obi-Wan doesn't even know why!

 

Yeah, Obi-Wan's eating habits probably have a lot to do with this early denial in this situation.