"Clifford Telegenic is a Monster."

You Are Here

Zerina hummed to herself as she climbed the stairs to her apartment with her groceries. They just didn’t write songs like these anymore. Subversive songs never took off, so all you had left were pro-Imperial ones, which were like religious songs but worse.

She fished for her keys. The noise of arguing and shouting bled through the walls beside her door. Mid, the Drall next door, was half deaf, and he probably just had his holos blasting again. When she opened the door and found that the noise was actually her son, Adlar, trading barbs with her grandchildren in the kitchen, she almost dropped her groceries. Then she came to her senses, put her fingers to her mouth, and whistled so hard her grandson nearly knocked over his glass of water.

Somehow, the usual kisses and hugs reserved for long-distant relatives were skipped. For one, everyone seemed resigned to the gravity of the situation. But there was also something different. Whatever the chronometer might say, Anden Tolan was certainly not a teenager anymore. Regardless of his youthful skin, regardless of the brave-but-pathetic facial hair he seemed to be trying to cultivate, it was there in his eyes. One saw the galaxy in them, the distances he’d traveled, the contrast between his childhood and what he’d gone through since. It was the scale of the universe in his eyes, just as it had always been in Avinn Krelz, his grandfather, the man that in another galaxy would have been Zerina’s husband instead of doing his duty to the Jedi Order and meeting the same fate. Kera, meanwhile, was something different all together. She seemed to try to make herself invisible in the corner of the room.

There was some near silent putting away of groceries before Anden started talking. “You might not wanna pack these too far in the pantry. You two are gonna be coming with us. It’s not safe for you to stay on Corellia.”

Adlar, their father, rolled his eyes.

“You really think you’re getting me off this rock?” Zerina said quietly, pausing her cabinet sorting and turning around to face the group.

Anden shook his head and dropped confidently into a chair. “No, you’re going to come along, I’m not going to have to make you. You’re gonna think about it and go ‘Oh, okay, time to go, I don’t want bucketheads kicking in the door and melting me.’”

“No, I like my door. But why would they do that?”

“Please, Gran-Gran,” Kera said softly. She looked up, but it was somewhat unfocused, like her mind wanted to slink around the corner from her chair and into the other room.

“Kera, it’s okay. Your father and I have things to do here. We’re not leaving until those are done,” Zerina said firmly.

Anden shook his head. “Look, I’m… pretty good at flying. Let’s just say that I’ve been… doing better in flight situations than other people. People with academy training and government issued fliers. And guns. If you catch my drift. And Kera didn’t – we didn’t want to leave you two to get in trouble because of us.”

“Anden, honey, you did that the second you two left. And I don’t mean that in a mean way. Your father and I are very proud of both of you.”

Adlar nodded grimly. Kera looked up. “We really didn’t get the chance to talk about part of it last time we called…” she began, but Zerina was already walking over to Anden.

“You must be quite the spacer, Anden, they made you an officer!” Zerina said facetiously as she reached down past his greatcoat and pulled at the hilt of the Corellian Navy cutlass he was wearing. Anden scrambled to stop her, but she pulled the handle free. It popped out a little too easily, and she stumbled back a step to look at the mere handle, handguard, and pommel she’d pulled from the sheath at his side. He was reaching up at her when she turned the handle around and saw the emitter hidden within the handle, the gleam of a green crystal within.

Kera froze. Adlar was wide eyed. Anden was staring, mouth agape, like he’d just been caught in flagrante. If the eyes hadn’t been enough to sadden Zerina with thoughts of the children’s grandfather, this was, and she began to well up as she stared twenty years back into the lightsaber hilt.

“So… don’t move your thumb and very carefully hand that back to me,” Anden said. Zerina blinked her tears away as she slowly returned Anden his weapon, which he slipped back into the sheath at his side. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you and Dad as to just why I’m capable of using one of those.”

Adlar scrubbed his face with one hand. Zerina took a deep breath, then noticed Kera looking away from the rest. “Adlar, talk to your son. I think I want to have a chat with your daughter.”

Kera didn’t look any more comfortable in the overstuffed chair in the bedroom than she did in the stiff-backed chair in the kitchen. Zerina lowered herself onto the bed. “So… considering what I just plucked from your brother, I take it things are going well for you two.”

“Yeah… things are great for him,” Kera said flatly.

“Him?”

“Yeah, he’s having a blast. I get to be his sidekick. Hooray.”

“Sidekick? Why sidekick?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Because he flies the ship and has a lightsaber? Maybe that’s why?”

“Well, why did he get to be the one with the lightsaber? Where’s yours?”

“What do you mean, ‘Where’s mine?’ I can’t catch blaster bolts with one in midair.” Kera pouted for a moment, but then something seized her and she sat up and started almost shouting. “I spent my childhood loving Jedi, practically worshipping them. Then the Clone Wars happen, and Mom and Dad and you are telling me to shut up about them, and I do, but I never believed what the teachers and the Empire said. Never. These people couldn’t be like that. No way.

“Then we grow up, and it turns out the Empire’s bad! Told you so! And Anden runs off to start a fight, because he’s Anden, and I chase him and before you know it it’s time for the Tolans to save the galaxy, just like all the books from growing up, and it’s his! It’s his kriffing power. He gets to be the savior, he gets to be the big galaxy hero. I get to… fix things. Fix the war droid. Fix his ship. I guess it’s for the best, though. If I’d been born Force sensitive, the Jedi would have got me, and then I would have gone the way of the Jedi,” she concluded, throwing her arms in the air in a gesture of surrender and curling into a ball on the chair.

Zerina sighed. “Kera, I have something to tell you, and I don’t know how to tell you, because I don’t know how you don’t know by now. And that… probably sounds more scolding than I meant it to, because it’s not– oh, never mind.” Zerina took a deep breath and resettled herself.

“Kera… when you were born, your father fudged some numbers on some medical tests because he didn’t want the Jedi taking his daughter away.”

Kera slowly looked up from the knees that she’d been so intently studying.

“Because the tests indicated that the Jedi would have taken her. So he wrote down incorrect numbers. And that’s how he knew what to do when his son was born and the same thing happened. Even if his numbers weren’t as big as hers,” she said, forcing a smile and a wink.

“…what.”

“Kera. You’ve always had the same gifts as your brother. I’m guessing you just haven’t had enough time piloting to have it help your reflexes, or enough time fighting to learn to see your enemies’ moves before they make them.”

Kera looked dazed. After a long moment, she shook her head. “And now I know why Anden seemed so angry when he found out. Because now I feel like I’ve had an entire galaxy dropped on me.”

“Well, that feeling runs in the family, dear,” Zerina said with a chuckle.

Kera looked up. “Yeah… not only do I have to save the galaxy, I have to live up to like five thousand years of history and the Tolan name through a million heroic deeds in a hundred conflicts and standoffs. No pressure.”

Zerina walked over to Kera, then got down on a knee in front of her granddaughter. “I used to feel like that when I was younger. I grew up with the same family tree you have, the same history, but without the stigma the Imperials have brought to it. When I grew up, any kind of link to the Jedi was like nobility, like magic in the blood. And Kera, I didn’t have it. I have all these relics and books and things, and it’s a question of why? Why did the Force run through all this history, all these people, just to land on me? I’m not even Force sensitive! I’m going to fail the Tolan family name. Phrezn won Galaksz Nyiadkh. There when the galaxy needs, and I don’t know what to major in in school, let alone how to save the universe.”

Kera nodded.

“But you can’t think of it like that,” Zerina said. “Because it’s not true. If the family means anything, if there is some mystic Force-hand or something guiding anything with our family, then it hasn’t faded away, it’s not on its last breath. Why would it be? The Force did not exhale you with its dying breath at the tail end of a five thousand year dynasty, Kera Zerina Tolan. The Force spent five thousand years to make you.”

When Kera emerged from the bedroom, Anden was back in his seat. He popped to his feet. “So, yeah, Dad’s staying,” he said, smiling this time.

Kera smiled too. “Yeah. And we have places to be too, so let’s get going. There’s lots to do.”