"Sometimes, the Force whispers through wires and wrenches."
The hangar was never truly quiet. Even before the sun reached the temple spires, the massive stone archways of Bay Seven murmured with the breath of cooling engines, the subtle hiss of pressure valves, and the sleepy protest of droids rebooting into wakefulness.
And in the middle of it—already seated, legs crossed, eyes alert—was Elai.
He had arrived before the lights came on.
Seryth was not by his side. He'd left her sleeping by the garden steps.
He wasn't here to fight.
Today was not for action. It was for stillness.
He was here to listen.
Which made it all the more jarring when a voice—metallic and irritated—cut across the bay:
"Oh wonderful, the child's back. Because clearly what this hangar needed was more delicate spiritual chaos near live wiring!"
C3-T4 rolled across the polished floor, servos clicking with every sharp spin of his dome. His vocabulary matrix had long since bypassed standard politeness programming—an oversight the Council hadn't corrected.
A tall human in oil-streaked greys stumbled out from behind a half-dismantled speeder, holding a datapad and looking like he'd forgotten how mornings worked.
He stopped mid-step when he saw Elai.
The boy didn't speak.
Didn't wave.
Just sat there.
Waiting.
"…You've gotta be kidding," the mechanic muttered.
Revas.
Newly assigned. Briefed barely enough to avoid panic. Told only that "a child will arrive; do not be alarmed."
He had expected—hoped—for a few extra cycles to prepare.
Instead, he was met with silence, eyes that saw too much, and a five-year-old who radiated the kind of stillness usually found in Jedi Masters and reactor cores.
He cleared his throat. "You're… Elai?"
The boy nodded.
Revas scratched his head. "You're early."
"I was ready."
C3-T4 let out a frustrated chirp.
"Define ready. Ready to dismantle calibrated stabilizers? Ready to realign power couplings with feelings? Honestly—he looks like he thinks meditation can fix a broken thruster."
Revas tried not to laugh.
Tried.
Failed.
"Elai," he said carefully, "I'm Revas. Systems tech. Mostly work in diagnostics and retrofits. Been told I'm here to… help you learn."
"I want to," Elai replied.
"Why?"
"Because I didn't understand what the droid was doing yesterday."
From behind a column, C3-T4 froze in the act of updating a maintenance log.
"…Wait, what?"
Revas blinked. "So you followed us because—what, you were curious?"
Elai nodded again. "It was different. Loud. Honest."
"Loud and honest," Revas muttered. "Yeah, that tracks."
The mechanic glanced around, clearly still expecting a Master to step in. None did. The boy had been cleared. By the Council. With written authorization.
Revas exhaled through his teeth. "Alright. But let's get one thing straight: this isn't like Jedi training. It's slow. It's messy. Sometimes boring. We don't unlock hidden truths. We calibrate transponders."
Elai tilted his head. "Does it still matter?"
The question stopped Revas.
He looked down at the datapad, then at the boy who wasn't smiling—but wasn't testing him either.
Just waiting.
"Yeah," he said finally. "It matters."
He offered a hand.
Elai took it.
Behind them, C3-T4 beeped something vulgar and rolled toward the far terminal, muttering loudly about "child-sized tool hazards" and the fall of galactic civilization.
Revas didn't correct him.
Instead, he led Elai toward the speeder's open side panel.
"No touching unless I say so," he warned. "First rule of this work."
Elai crouched beside the exposed wiring.
Didn't touch.
Just listened.
And for now, that was enough.
The speeder's belly had been torn open the day before—stripped of its outer plating, most of its stabilizing coils, and nearly all semblance of dignity. Wires hung like vines from an old-world ruin, bundled in knotted threads of copper, flex-cord, and frayed shielding. Diagnostic readouts blinked in rhythmic protest, and the smell of ion-burned carbon lingered like someone had scorched the air out of frustration. Revas called it "the ghost cart." No one remembered who assigned it to this hangar. But it had become a monument to unfinished work.
And now, Elai sat beside it.
Barefoot, calm, hands in his lap.
Watching.
Revas crouched with a spanner in one hand and a blinking sensor wand in the other. He glanced at the boy again.
"You're not going to get bored?"
Elai shook his head.
Revas grunted. "Alright. Then lesson one."
He pointed toward the mass of internal wiring, where a panel blinks red in irregular pulses. "That's the primary stabilizer core relay. Looks boring. It's not. If this thing is off by even two points of calibration, you get vibration in your vector fins. Vibration means drift. Drift means you slam into things you were trying to avoid."
Elai leaned slightly forward.
"But it's not just wires," Revas continued. "It's language. This—" he tapped the relay gently "—is a sentence. The ship is trying to say: 'I'm tired.' Or maybe: 'My spine hurts.' Our job is to figure out what it really means."
Elai didn't smile.
But his eyes flickered with something sharp and bright. Recognition, perhaps. Or understanding just on the edge of formation.
Behind them, C3-T4 passed by again, clanking loudly across the durasteel floor with a crate of spare resistors hovering behind him on a repulsorlift. The droid didn't stop.
"Warning: minor lifeforms may attempt to absorb knowledge through osmosis. Recommend safety goggles. Or a wall."
Revas ignored him.
"You see those three bundles?" he asked, pointing. "Each has different shielding. One's standard flight logic. One's targeting data. The third?" He paused. "Power redistribution feed. Never splice that one wrong. You can rewire it. You shouldn't."
Elai leaned closer but kept his hands on his knees. "Why are they twisted?"
"To reduce interference. If you run high-load power too close to nav-core input, you get cross-talk. Ships start thinking they're somewhere they're not."
"Like a person?" Elai asked.
Revas blinked.
"…Yeah. Kind of. Same thing, really. Too much power next to the wrong thought, and you start hearing things that don't belong to you."
Elai nodded slowly.
"Can I try something?" he asked.
Revas hesitated—but handed him a sensor wand.
"Just don't press anything glowing."
Elai extended the tool toward the relay housing and paused. He paused—not because he doubted, but because he listened.The wand clicked faintly as it passed over the relay. Numbers flickered on the handle's readout.
"Underrun on channel four," Elai said quietly.
Revas blinked again. "That's… exactly right."
"I felt it," Elai added, as if apologizing for knowing without knowing how.
He set the wand down without ceremony.
And something shifted.
Not in the machine. In the man beside him.
Revas scratched the back of his neck. "Okay. New rule. If you feel something, say so."
Elai gave a quiet nod.
C3-T4 rolled by again, carrying a datapad on one claw.
"Message for Revas: High Council Review says if the child dies during lessons, you're filling out the paperwork. Also: he is not certified. You are not certified. I am the only being here that meets certification standards."
Revas stared at the droid. "We're calibrating a power relay."
"Yes. And if that relay arcs, I'll be the one buffing the ashes off the floor."
The droid grumbled and clanked off toward the far wall again.
Revas shook his head. "He wasn't always like that. Something about the old memory core getting crossed with a CorSec training file."
Elai smiled faintly now.
Not wide. Not giddy.
But real.
And Revas, noticing it, looked back toward the speeder and motioned him over.
"Alright, Ashari," he said without thinking.
Elai looked up.
It wasn't a name he'd used in the Temple.
Not aloud.
But Revas said it made sense.
"…That's who you are, right?" the tech asked.
Elai nodded slowly.
Revas didn't press.
"Then let's get to work."
They spent the rest of the morning rebalancing current through the stabilizer. Then mapping system integrity across the nav-core. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't fast. But every time Elai reached for a tool, he hesitated—just long enough to remember the line Revas had taught him.
"It's not wires. It's sentences."
And slowly, those wires began to speak.
By midday, the speeder's lower chassis had been reconnected, the repulsor grid humming faintly beneath its frame. Elai knelt beside the exposed control junction, holding the diagnostic pad steady as Revas pointed out data fluctuations in real-time.
"You see that spike?" Revas muttered. "That's not voltage. That's an attitude problem. This ship wants to list left because some genius routed the thruster feedback through a fatigued splitter node."
Elai nodded, frowning in concentration. "So it's remembering the wrong balance?"
Revas blinked, then grinned. "Yeah. Exactly. Just like a person with a limp. It adapts—but it's not right. That's why we're here."
He leaned in, pried the casing loose with a magnet-wand, and passed it to Elai. "Replace it. Blue ringed relay. Not red."
Elai didn't hesitate. His fingers were small, but his motions had precision. Each motion is deliberate, balanced between certainty and calm.
C3-T4 trundled back in at that moment—whirring with overclocked annoyance, a bundle of charge converters stacked in one claw, two low-grade maintenance droids following in an uncertain V-shape behind him.
"Reactor bleed routed through sub-panel D. Illegal. Unethical. Unprofessional. I swear by the sacred firmware of the Core Worlds, if I find one more junction box wired by intuition instead of specification—"
He halted.
Saw Elai.
Paused.
A low servo hiss sounded dangerously like a sigh.
"I was reassigned because of you," the droid said, voice modulator a little too sharp. "Two years in primary intake. Dignified. Linear. Peaceful. Now—" he gestured to a heap of melted cable cores— "I argue with spirit-sensitive younglings who guess their way through diagnostics like monks praying at a broken vaporator."
Elai glanced up. "But I didn't guess."
C3-T4's optic flickered.
Then slowly dimmed.
"That… may be worse."
The droid spun with exaggerated motion and rolled away again—one arm raised mid-air like a stormy lecture to no one in particular. His muttering carried across the hangar:
"When the Jedi fall, it won't be a war. It will be creative children."
Revas chuckled under his breath.
"Don't worry," he told Elai. "If he really hated you, he'd be polite."
Elai's answer was a quiet blink. Then he returned to his work.
Just then—soft footsteps.
Not mechanical.
Not masked by engines or work crews.
Haro.
He'd come in through the far corridor, a dataslate under one arm, half-turning to ask someone a question when he spotted the boy crouched by the speeder.
Their eyes met.
Haro froze.
The silence between them lasted only a heartbeat.
Then—Haro spun on his heel and ran.
No greeting. No nod. Just vanished down the corridor as if the Force itself had given him an instinctual command: Avoid.
Revas stared after him.
"That one always was high-strung."
Elai watched the empty corridor a little longer.
"He looked scared," he said softly.
Revas didn't answer.
But C3-T4, who had paused mid-circuit to glare at a wall panel, muttered:
"If you'd ever spoken to Haro, you'd understand. The boy thinks whispering too loud causes system errors."
Elai returned to his work in silence. But Revas noticed the way his posture shifted—straighter now. Calmer. As if Haro's panic wasn't confusion.
It was clear.
This was his path.
Later, Revas passed to Elai , a small holopad filled with exploded engine schematics and readouts.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we calibrate engines."
"And the day after?"
"We make something work that shouldn't."
Elai nodded.
And across the hangar, C3-T4 whispered, almost grudging:
"At this rate, he'll rewire me next."
The hangar bays of the Jedi Temple were never quiet.
Even in their most routine hours, they thrummed with movement—technicians barking orders across scaffolds, padawans assisting with maintenance runs, droids weaving through fuel lines like busy insects. But over the last several days, a new rhythm had begun to form. One that didn't come from repulsorlifts or warning klaxons.
It came from a barefoot child who kept showing up before anyone else.
Elai.
By the seventh morning, no one questioned why he was there. They simply looked up to see him already seated cross-legged on the floor by the diagnostic console, or trailing behind Revas with calm, patient steps as if the entire Temple had reassigned him unofficially.
The Temple's daily flow bent around him—never loudly, never with fanfare. Just with quiet awareness.
A few Knights passed through on routine patrols, casting uncertain glances toward the child who wasn't a Padawan, yet operated diagnostic scans like he'd been doing it for years. A couple of younger initiates watched from upper catwalks, whispering.
"Is he a tech initiate now?"
"I thought he was with Master Kcaj."
"Maybe he's… "
From a nearby lift shaft, two Masters paused mid-conversation, observing the boy with practiced stillness. One sipped from a cup of stimcaf. The other tilted their head, unreadable.
"Has the Council approved this arrangement?"
"Not officially. But I heard Dooku endorsed it."
"Hm. That explains nothing and everything."
Even the droids—conditioned to ignore organic irregularity—began to adjust.
C3-T4 now recalculated his patrol route to avoid arguments before they began. His logs included new subroutines labeled: [YOUNGLING—INTERFERENCE: ANTICIPATED]. Floor sweepers chirped when they rolled near Elai's feet. Mechanic arms paused fractionally longer when the boy approached their work zones.
But it wasn't because he demanded space.
It was because the space around him seemed to listen.
One afternoon, a meditation group passed through on the way to a starship blessing ceremony. Their leading Knight slowed upon seeing the child beneath a half-disassembled transport, holding a cooling core steady while Revas adjusted the interior fuse matrix.
The Knight murmured to a fellow:
"That's the boy they keep speaking about."
"Who?"
"The one who walks like he's already chosen."
The phrase lingered—carried through corridors, training halls, archives.
Some dismissed it as Temple gossip.
Others wondered.
And among the older Masters who remembered the days of children whose paths did not fit perfect molds, more than one made a quiet note to pass through the hangar in the days to come.
To watch.
To listen.
To see what the Force was shaping in its own way.
By midday, the hangar had settled into its usual mechanical hum—ship lifts whirred, coolant hissed from lines like metallic breath, and the low groan of a YT-2000's landing gear being retracted filled the lower deck.
Elai sat quietly beneath a diagnostics panel, watching the data stream scroll across the interface like cascading light. He didn't tap commands like a Knight would. He watched until he understood, then made exactly one adjustment.
Behind him, Revas crouched beside an access hatch, half-swallowed by the belly of a training freighter. His voice echoed out with grease-tinged frustration.
"Alright, swap the modulator coil first, or the whole alignment schema resets. You remember what happened yesterday?"
"I do," Elai said, without turning. "You used a word I hadn't heard before."
There was a loud clank, followed by a muffled curse in a dialect the Temple archives might have banned. A moment later, Revas popped out of the hatch, hair slicked to his forehead with coolant mist.
"I did. And I stand by it."
A shrill whirrr-huff-krnk approached from the corridor.
C3-T4.
The maintenance droid rolled around the corner at slightly above safe Temple speed, gears twitching with unnecessary tension. He spotted Elai instantly and let out a groan that sounded entirely too sentient.
"NOT. AGAIN."
Elai blinked at him innocently.
C3-T4's vocabulator hiccupped as he spiraled closer. "You! Jedi-young-Force-child! Do you even know how many recalibration routines you've interfered with this week? Seven! And that's only the ones I documented properly, which is difficult when SOMEONE erases my logs by accidentally touching the panel with the Force!"
Elai didn't look up. "I didn't touch the panel."
"You looked at it!"
"That's not illegal."
"I have filed two complaints!"
"Did they go through?"
C3-T4 sputtered.
Revas tried to smother a laugh and failed miserably, making a sharp snorting noise before quickly turning it into a cough. The droid's optics rotated furiously.
"And now you're his accomplice! Oh, this is a miscarriage of Temple protocol! A full-scale repair disaster cloaked in robes!"
"I'm not wearing robes," Elai said.
The droid screamed internally.
And then, salvation arrived—or doom, depending on one's circuits.
Footsteps echoed in the upper gantry.
The unmistakable silhouette of Haro the technician passed overhead. He paused. Saw Elai. Saw Revas laughing. Saw C3-T4 glowing faint red with overdrive irritation.
And immediately turned around and ran.
Not walking.
Not paced.
Ran.
Revas called after him: "Haro! We weren't even going to make you fix anything today—!"
A door slammed somewhere beyond the corridor.
C3-T4 watched him go.
"Lucky. I don't get reassigned."
He turned back to Elai, twitching.
"Why couldn't I get an emergency reassignment after my mental processor nearly boiled down dealing with you?"
Elai looked at him gently. "Maybe the Force thinks we're not finished yet."
There was a long, hollow silence.
C3-T4's head rotated 180 degrees.
"I'm filing a third complaint."
He rolled away in a storm of muttered binary and exaggerated exhaust puffs.
Revas, still grinning, leaned back against the hull and exhaled.
"You know… I used to think this job was peaceful."
Elai said nothing, eyes following the blinking diagnostic rhythm on the screen.
Revas watched him for a long moment, then added, "But I'll admit something, kid."
"What?"
"You make the hangar feel like it matters again."
Elai looked up at him, then out toward the massive open gates where sunlight filtered across the temple floor.
And he smiled.
Not for long.
But just enough.
Days rotated like slow gears, greased with habit and softened by repetition.
Elai no longer wandered uncertainly in the hangar bays.
He walked with purpose.
The morning lights now greeted him as familiarly as Temple bells. The scent of ferro-grease, synth-oil, and ozone were no longer strange—they were maps, memories, a kind of gravity his steps began to follow without thought.
Each day began the same.
He would arrive before Revas.
C3-T4 would already be there, pretending not to notice him, muttering diagnostics into the floor.
And Elai, without instruction, would start.
At first, it was sweeping debris. Then clearing toolkits. Then checking clamps and seals. Small tasks. Minor.
But each one had weight.
Each one whispered its own logic—how systems breathed together. Why seals mattered. What it meant when a panel thrummed with uneven tone.
This was not Force training. It wasn't lightsaber katas or meditative reflection.
But it was still in rhythm.
And Elai listened.
Revas had stopped treating him like a strange curiosity.
Now he treated him like a mechanic.
"You calibrate like a Corellian born," he muttered one afternoon, inspecting Elai's triple-check of the sublight stabilizers on a half-assembled Jedi scout vessel. "That's a compliment."
"Is Corellian calibration different?" Elai asked without looking up.
"No. But they think it is, which means they charge twice as much."
Elai blinked. "That sounds dishonest."
"Exactly."
Revas gave him a lopsided grin and tossed him a spanner.
"You'll go far, kid."
Elai caught it smoothly, turning the tool in his fingers before sliding under the access plate like he'd done it for years.
Even C3-T4 had softened.
Marginally.
The droid still grumbled, still cataloged his weekly 'complaints' into a neatly archived datapad that he insisted he would submit to the High Council "once democracy returns to the Temple's repair hierarchy."
But once, when Elai accidentally shocked himself trying to realign a power coupler, it was C3-T4 who rushed in, barked at Revas to move, and deployed a medical pulse to stabilize his hand.
He even muttered, "Biologicals—so inefficient."
Revas had stared for a long time.
So had Elai.
No one said anything.
But from that day, the droid brought him a replacement tool belt—adjusted for his size.
With labels.
Misspelled, but present.
The hangar itself had become more than a workplace.
It became an observation.
Jedi passed through sometimes—Knights, Masters, rarely younglings.
They all saw the boy.
Working without robe, without braid, fingers black with carbon, crouched in the shadow of vessels built for war and peace alike.
Some watched with curiosity.
Some with confusion.
A few with quiet approval.
But none interfered.
Not anymore.
It had been sanctioned, after all.
An experiment, some said.
A risk, whispered others.
But Revas just shrugged when asked.
"He's not learning how to be a Jedi here," he said once. "He's learning how not to break one."
And no one had argued.
One morning, Elai stood on a scaffold alone, adjusting a set of sensor pings on a long-range tracking antenna.
He paused.
The hum of the hangar dropped beneath the weight of awareness.
He didn't turn—but he knew someone had entered.
It wasn't the steps of Revas or the droid's wheels that approached.
Someone larger. Still. Focused.
Master Kcaj.
He said nothing for a moment.
Just watched the boy finish aligning the sensor's final tooth, then step back, wipe his hands, and climb down the scaffold with the calm of someone who had never been told this wasn't his place.
Kcaj nodded, faintly.
"You look smaller beneath these ships," he said.
Elai tilted his head. "I feel more here."
Kcaj's eyes sharpened—not with judgment. With interest.
"And?"
Elai looked back at the YT-2400 hull. He breathed.
"Every ship has systems. Every person too. Some just... don't get repaired as often."
Kcaj let out a slow breath.
And said no more.
He did not stay long.
But when he left—
Revas came around the corner.
Held up a data chip.
And tossed it to Elai.
"Think you're ready to install a guidance uplink?"
Elai caught it.
Nodded once.
"I'll try."
By the third week, the rumors spread.
Not rumors of danger or scandal—but of oddity.
A child apprenticed to a repair chief.
No robes. No rites. Just a hydrospanner and a head full of questions.
In the Temple archives, the scribes began quietly logging the arrangement under nontraditional training protocols. In the cafeteria, younglings whispered and guessed.
"Do you think he failed his trials?"
"He's too young for trials."
"Maybe he's building a ship to leave."
"He talks to the droid."
"No one talks to that droid."
Meanwhile, C3-T4 patrolled the hangar with a new vocal routine:
"Warning: A child is loose in the maintenance wing. Jedi disregard for containment protocols will be reported to the Galactic Engineering Union. Level 7 disaster imminent."
Elai followed him silently with a tool pouch, eyes focused on the relay coils they were meant to replace.
He didn't argue.
He had learned: the louder the droid, the simpler the problem.
That day, the coils sparked when activated.
C3-T4 shrieked.
Elai just toggled the ground switch and muttered, "Red before green, remember?"
The droid glared—somehow—and stormed off muttering about organic sabotage.
Elai smiled faintly and finished the repair.
Revas watched from his corner, arms folded.
The kid had rhythm now.
Not flashy. Not Jedi. But something else.
He didn't race through diagnostics anymore.
He read them—like music, like meaning.
"Never seen someone that age handle cross-system interface timing like that," Revas said one afternoon, more to himself than anyone. "It's not learning. It's like he's remembering."
C3-T4 beeped in agreement—then caught himself and froze.
"…Hypothetically."
One evening, after Temple curfew hours, Elai lingered beneath the wing of a grounded patrol vessel, rechecking the sealant codes.
Outside the hangar, night lights dimmed across the upper spires.
Inside, the world still hummed.
Seryth had joined him that week.
Not during work hours—but after.
At twilight, she padded in softly through the hangar arch, her pale fur catching the soft blue glows of the landing lights.
She never barked.
Never interrupted.
Just curled nearby, silent.
Watching.
Revas once paused when he saw her. "You know," he said, gesturing with a socket spanner, "I worked with a Jedi once who had a Togruta companion that used to bring me leaf snacks after shifts."
Elai looked up. "Did you like them?"
"I hated them."
Elai didn't smile. But the corners of his mouth lifted slightly.
The fourth week ended with the arrival of a Jedi Knight from Naboo.
Her vessel was damage-scorched—carbon scoring across the right thruster, stabilizers twitching out of phase.
Revas winced.
"I hate patchwork repairs," he muttered. "Like putting bandages on a leaky pipe."
But it was Elai who walked up beside him and pointed.
"The phase gap isn't the problem," he said. "It's the harmonic frequency from the coolant buffer. That's what's unbalancing the rear flight control."
Revas squinted. Checked.
He blinked once. "...Hells."
He gave Elai a hard look. Then softer.
"I trained adults for twenty years and none of them caught that."
Elai shrugged.
"I listened to it hum."
Later that night, Elai sat cross-legged on the scaffolding platform while the rest of the hangar dimmed for rest mode.
Seryth lay below, a silent watch near the base.
C3-T4 hovered nearby but said nothing.
For once.
Elai stared out toward the city beyond the shielded glass dome.
The lights of Coruscant blinked like a thousand vessels—some fast, some silent, some never seen again.
He held a datapad of Revas's old schematics.
Not reading.
Just holding.
Thinking.
Feeling the shape of systems.
The way pressure fed into balance.
The way energy always needed grounding, or it burned.
He looked down at his hands.
They no longer looked like children.
Not here.
Not under this light.
And far above, in one of the Temple's upper towers, Count Dooku stood at a window, arms folded behind his back.
He had watched the reports.
He had heard the whispers.
He had even read C3-T4's strongly worded complaints, most of which he found unexpectedly insightful.
"You didn't choose the normal path," he said softly, as if speaking to the stars.
"But you are walking one that may be needed."
Behind him, the shadows waited.
But Dooku did not turn from the window.
He simply watched the hangar glow beneath him like a quiet forge—
Where something rare was being made.
The hangar had grown quiet.
Repairs still buzzed in the upper scaffolds, and the low thrum of a repulsor rig echoed now and then from the back bay, but the center floor was calm. The usual shuffle of mechanics and droids had tapered into sparse pockets of motion. Day shift was winding down.
Except for Elai.
He sat on a crate near the underside of a stripped-down shuttle, legs folded, tools neatly arranged beside him—no longer in disarray, but laid out with precision. His hands worked with surprising speed, wrist-deep in a wiring cluster twice his arm's span, making quiet, precise adjustments with a soldering stylus and reconditioned probe.
Above, on a rail, the maintenance droid C3-T4 hovered and watched.
He wasn't here on duty. He simply refused to leave the child unsupervised.
He simply didn't trust the child not to electrocute himself.
Or worse—succeed.
T4 made a low chuffing sound, like an exhaust hiccup.
"Statement: There are days I doubt the future of the Order. Then I remember organic inefficiency will eventually correct itself."
Elai kept working.
A pair of red micro-diodes blinked as he reversed polarity on a faulty feedback loop. The internal vent stabilizer reengaged. The shuttle's core readout pulsed green for the first time in weeks.
The droid rotated slightly in midair. His sensor lens dilated.
"Observation…" he muttered to himself, this time in Binary.
{"That child solved a cascade fault in under twenty minutes. Efficient. Elegant. Perhaps even… competent."}
He let the thought hang in the air like mist.
Then—calmly, clearly, and in perfect droidspeak—Elai replied without looking up:
{"You forgot insightful."}
Silence.
C3-T4's repulsors hiccupped.
The droid froze in place.
"Recursion error," he said aloud. "Please confirm… you understood that?"
Elai glanced up now, a faint smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
{"You speak very clearly when you're not being loud."}
The droid's chassis twitched.
"This is an inappropriate use of logic comprehension by a biological under six standard years of age!"
Elai returned to the panel calmly.
{"Then I'll try to forget it. But it's hard. You repeat yourself often."}
C3-T4 backed away three meters in stunned silence. Then hovered forward again. Then back.
"Query: Has anyone… logged this development?"
Elai wiped his hands, replaced the casing, and shut the panel. The repaired shuttle hummed to life in standby mode.
He said nothing more.
C3-T4 turned slowly toward the hangar ceiling and released a drawn-out synthetic sigh.
"Statement: Reassign me again. I dare you."
[SYSTEM UPDATE — Training Milestone Achieved]
New Skills Unlocked:
Basic Repair (Lv. 1)
You can restore functionality to non-complex systems using standard tools and logic trees. Effective on ships, droids, and field tech.
Diagnostics (Lv. 1)
You interpret system behavior, error signals, and degraded power lines. Identifies mechanical weaknesses before failure occurs.
Droid Language: Binary Comprehension (Lv. 1)
Through active exposure and pattern recognition, you now understand and communicate in Droidspeak. Some units may react... strongly.
Trait Gained: [Intuitive Mechanist]
"Circuits hum when you listen first."
→ Minor boost to repair accuracy. Increased chance of nonverbal understanding with machines and synthetic systems.
[Stat Gained:]
Intellect +1
Perception +1
Focus +1
Force Efficiency +1
Reaction +1
Later that evening, long after the primary hangar lighting dimmed into maintenance mode, Elai remained.
He moved without rush, quietly gathering the tools he'd used throughout the day. Each one was wiped clean, inspected, and returned to its place in the portable kit Haro had grudgingly allowed him to use. He tapped a few notes into a borrowed datapad—observations on power draw anomalies in auxiliary shuttles, possible cooling faults in the southern speeder bank, and a small design inefficiency in the new generator mounts that he thought could be rerouted. He marked the last entry simply: Stillness helps wiring breathe.
The space around him felt quieter now than usual. Not empty—just quieter.
It had been a little over a month since the Council had approved this unusual apprenticeship, and yet already, murmurs echoed across the Temple halls.
A child—no Padawan braid, no official title—had embedded himself among the engineers and maintenance crews. And not just observing. Fixing. Learning. Understanding. Jedi who once passed through the hangar without a glance now lingered by doorways. They watched from a distance, their purpose wasn't correction. It was a quiet observation.
Some saw curiosity. Others saw foreshadowing.
The question grew louder each day, even though no one dared voice it too directly:
Who will he choose next?
Because clearly, the child would move on. He always did. And when he did—whose skills would shape him next?
But Elai didn't seem concerned.
He wiped the floor beneath his station, sat beside Seryth—who now slept curled beside the speeder lift—and closed his eyes for a moment. Not meditating. Just resting where the air hummed low with circuits and effort.
The droid didn't follow him.
But long after Elai left the workbench and the lights faded to standby blue, a faint metallic hum could still be heard above the shuttle frame.
C3-T4 hovered silently along a rail track, posture unusually low, sensors dimmed to minimum.
He didn't speak.
Not loudly, anyway.
Only a faint mutter escaped from his emitter as he floated in slow circles above the now-empty workspace:
"Statement: It is statistically improbable for someone so small to be this consistently competent. Further recalibration required…"
He stayed there for hours. Watching the space Elai had occupied. As if by proximity alone, he might yet understand what the boy had already learned.
The warning came without form.
It came without sound, without sight. Only weight.
By the late second shift, Elai had stopped speaking. He hadn't spoken much to begin with, but now even his quiet affirmations had vanished. His eyes tracked every vibration in the deck, every pulse of light from the diagnostics console. The sounds of the hangar—hydraulic hisses, droid mutterings, plasma buzzes—had begun to stretch, to bend, as if warped through water.
Seryth had noticed first.
She hadn't left the rafters in days. But now she stood, tail stiff, ears rotating in tiny arcs. She wasn't tense or afraid—only listening deeper.
Elai dropped the calibrator.
It clattered once on the workbench, bounced against a stripped repulsorlift housing—and he didn't pick it up. He stepped back from the repair without a word, still wearing his tools across his belt, oil smudged on one wrist.
"Where—are you—going?" the droid called after him, its tone lurching between exasperation and what might've been genuine mechanical concern.
Elai didn't answer.
Didn't even hear it.
He crossed the threshold of the hangar with steady, even steps.
Down the corridor. Past two younglings being escorted to flight simulator orientation. Past a Knight who turned to watch, brow furrowed. Elai did not acknowledge them.
The Force did not shout. It simply enveloped him.
His feet brought him to a lesser-used passage that curved behind the high training spires. Through the old meditation walkway, across a bridge of stained transparisteel where Temple light met city haze.
And then—to Pad Six.
A small open landing pad rarely used except for off-schedule diplomatic arrivals.
He stepped into its quiet center, the wind catching faintly at the edges of his tunic.
Then sat.
Cross-legged.
Still.
Seryth appeared minutes later, padding out from the outer walkway, her ears still twitching as if following threads no one else could hear. She circled once, then settled beside him, facing the Temple.
They didn't speak.
They didn't need to.
And above them, far beyond Coruscant's clouds, something stirred.
It didn't take long for people to notice.
A Temple guard passed the pad's observation window and doubled back, peering out again.
A senior Archivist paused mid-step after spotting Seryth's white coat curling in the breeze.
Within the hour, the whispers returned.
"He left mid-repair."
"Just sat down and didn't move."
"Did someone call for him?"
"No. That's the thing. He just knew."
A pair of Knights stood in the mezzanine near the archives, exchanging low theories.
"Another Force event?"
"Or the Song again."
"Yoda will want to know."
"He already does."
No orders were given. No one was told to retrieve him.
And yet, more than a dozen Jedi passed near Pad Six that cycle—some walking, some waiting, some pretending to study nearby walkways.
None of them disturbed him.
They simply… watched.
A Knight from the diplomacy wing muttered to her companion, "Why don't we do that? Just go when the Force calls?"
The other Knight smiled faintly. "Because we're taught to wait for permission."
And so, Elai sat.
Listening.
Breathing.
And the Temple, once again, held its breath with him.