"I can imagine. I don't know how the Jedi manage to keep anyone at all."

"Well...it wasn't the Jedi back then. I was born in the middle of nowhere and they didn't have anybody testing. They picked me up later."

She thinks about it, and then nods. "Makes sense. Sounds like you had one round of bad luck after another, then."

He laughs.

"Yeah, you could say that. I thought I was so lucky when the Jedi picked me up..."

Snort.

"Yep. Turns out they all suck. Surprise!"

"Yeah. And plenty of Sith are that bad, too. I'm glad you got your ship, however you managed it."

"I mean, I didn't get off that planet in this one. I had to convince a guy to get me somewhere I could actually save without somebody catching me and bringing me back. But...yeah, I'm glad too."

"Yeah, I meant - you have your freedom. That's important."

"Yeah. It really is."

He's not sure whether it's the most important thing, but...it's way up there.

"Mmhmm." The potatoes are scrubbed; she puts them in the pot to boil and joins him at the table to shell the beans.

He grabs a handful of beans to help.

"...so, how do you build a saber, anyway?"

It turns out that that's a specialty of hers; she can go on about it for a while.

His will need a custom design, she points out relatively quickly - something to compensate for the inclusion, to keep it from exploding under the wrong kind of strain.

Oh, that's interesting.

"Like, what, a vent? Sounds kind of explodey itself."

"Not if you do it right. I think I can come up with something a little nicer for you, anyway, though, unless you want it for the aesthetic."

"I wanna see what you can come up with. You've got good judgement, aesthetic-wise."

"All right. I might be more than a couple months at that, there's a couple tools I'll need to build."

He nods.

"Plans first, though, right? Or do we need to...test the crystal first, somehow?"

"Yeah, I need to see how it reacts to channeling energy before I know what's safe to do with it. I could make up some plans first, but then you might get your heart set on something you can't actually do."

"Yeah, better not. I'd probably try to do it anyway and explode myself."

"And I like you better unexploded." She puts her arm around his shoulders in an impromptu hug.

--oh. What? What's happening here?

He definitely likes it, but...he's confused.

He hugs her back.

This is not conducive to getting lunch made. She goes back to shelling beans after a minute.

But: "You're pretty cool, Kai-Zi. I get the feeling you haven't heard that much."

"Yeah. Not a ton."

He's smiling as he shells beans.

"Thanks."

"Seems like the kind of thing you should know."

That's it for beans; she gets a knife and a cutting board and starts on the herbs.