That's pretty unpleasant, especially while meditating. He doesn't get enough of a look to pick up any details, but his impression in the Force is that it's not an especially urgent problem; he won't disrupt the equartier over it.

Five more hours to the next rest stop. Not much to see there. 

A third set of equartiers take them the last three hours.

Then, up an elevator and into a room filled with bunk beds, mostly empty. More food? Sleep? "We don't ring the shifts here, but if you care, the local time is 14 hours. Food is available 30/30. The border is two klicks north."

It's definitely getting to be evening according to Rafiik's sense of time, and it's a good idea to be fresh for the border crossing attempt. "Do either of you have any objections to getting some sleep before we continue?" he asks Mirana and Tomas.

They both look like they're ready to drop but are trying to hide it, and do not object to sleep.

Time for bed, then. Rafiik usually takes his lightsaber off to sleep, the holster belt is bulky and uncomfortable, but for tonight it seems wiser to keep it. He takes the closest bunk to the door that he can get.

Mirana picks a bed twenty feet away. Tomas goes to the opposite wall.

Rafiik has no particular objection to this; Tomas' choice is maybe not the best sign, but it's clear enough that the man finds him intimidating.

Zzzzz.

There are no emotional disturbances while he sleeps.

When he wakes, Tomas is elsewhere, and Mirana is sitting up in bed, holding a rock and looking away, but with a posture that suggests she could have been watching him a moment ago.

That's a little disconcerting to wake up to but he's not going to confront her about it, or at least not right away. He heads for the bathroom, keeping an eye out for Tomas on the way, and then finds a butler to ask if there's a private room he can have use of for half an hour or an hour.

There's a meeting room he's welcome to use; just close the door and no one will come in unless there's an emergency.

Tomas is parked halfway up the nearest ladder with just his head above the surface.

Would Rafiik like breakfast? It's his old missed connection, green latke!

Tomas is super legit. Rafiik stops in the dorm for a moment to let Mirana know he wants to talk to her in the meeting room after breakfast and goes and gets some latkes.

She goes and waits for him and fiddles with her rock...

"Do you have questions? I think that no one here other than us three should know about the thing you can do with the Force to get the truth."

"I wasn't going to share that, no. I want to know if there's anything else you lied to me about, or anything you didn't tell me because you were lying to me."

"We didn't tell you about a lot of species, because we thought that if you knew about more species, you would be more upset about what the Sith did.

The most important of those is the elves, because the elves are what we have instead of the Force. When we were talking about the Force, and how it was kind of like a person who has seen everything, I was thinking of the Lei elves. Elves can write their memories in places - that's what a 'shrine' is, what makes it more than just a town. There are shrines that don't have towns, even. So it's not the elves that are important, it's the elves and the shrines that we hold for them. All of that is Lei.

In connection with that... the particular bad thing that FD did, er, one particular bad thing that they did that I dodged describing, is that they used species magic to hurt people. Or, you know, they hurt people weaker than them - 'disiniuria'. Like how if a Sith used Sith magic to kill someone, that would be worse than just killing someone with a knife? Mostly just they burned people with catfire, which you already knew about, but we didn't want you thinking about species at all.

Also, the story that FD told about apples was different; they said that there were two species involved, species that don't actually exist, but... the FD created a lot of species recently and I guess they were hoping that two more would sound fine, sound like it could be true. The first are the 'undines', who can tell what people are thinking, which is not really how magic works - your thoughts matter, but it doesn't reach into other people's thoughts. Except Jedi magic, I guess. But not us. Anyway, the other species is the apple trees themselves. Which is not how species work; there are species that come from plants, but they move around and talk - stuff that people do. But supposedly, the 'undines' can read the thoughts of the 'apple trees', and they say that they're people and that's why everyone has to stop growing apples.

It's true that they hurt people who were growing apples, but that's not even the worst thing. They broke the shrines and they killed the elves who remembered anything from them. That's the reason they want to hurt us, because we follow our elves, our Lei, and the story about the apples is there to make other people, who don't want to hurt the elves, okay with the FD hurting us.

Oh, I didn't tell the you full name of the FD; it's a long explanation. And there's probably more, but, uh, any questions?"

"Why do you think the Sith were here?"

"Well someone made us, probably someone who looks like a breeder or a 'human'. Someone very powerful. Not a Jedi, because Jedi get stronger over time and creating breeders seems like the opposite of that, so probably the Sith?"

"That's not how Jedi or Sith work. My home has - I don't have the word - a bicycle is a thing that makes going, you don't need magic to go on a bicycle, it does it a different way. We have things that do lots of things the different way, and we have things that can make people that way. I don't know of a thing that can give someone magic the different way but I don't think Jedi or Sith can do it, either, and if we can I don't think Sith are more likely."

"Okay... Making magic like riding a bicycle seems wrong to me but making people like riding a bicycle also seems wrong, and making people is either breeder magic or a kind of magic that all species created by breeders have, so...

Riding a bicycle is a 'skill' - something that all species can do if they watch other people do it and then work at it."

"I don't mean riding, I mean the kind of thing the bicycle is. Or the room that goes up and down that we used to get here from the equartiers, if that wasn't magic."

"Lifting the rocks which then make the room move is a werewolf thing. Making the room also needs werewolves and probably a bunch of other species. Same to make a bicycle. I think you're talking about how there are probably ways to make them without werewolves, same as I can make fire by walking into the sun until my fur runs hungry, but easier than that... And you can make people without using breeder magic?"

"Usually when people make people at home they need a male and a female, and the new person starts inside the female and is like the male and female that made them. That doesn't need magic - the only thing that's even maybe magic at home is the Force, and people who can see the Force are rarer than rolling twelve dice and getting a six on all of them, but almost all people can make new people. The other way, where the person starts inside a thing, doesn't need magic either; it does need things from at least one person but the new person can be pretty different from them. Because almost nobody has magic we learned how to do lots if things without it - my music isn't magic either."

"Most people have no magic, so you do everything without magic, okay. Wow.

Yes... it works that way, with a male and a female, with animals here, and that's the normal way to make people too, with a male and a female of the same species. But all people came from a breeder at some point in the past, and that works differently: a breeder and an animal make a person, or a breeder and a person. Oh, and it's also possible to make a new breeder with male and female breeders, but usually it's two females.

So we're not that different, it's just that, without breeder magic, there wouldn't be people, just animals."

"Ah, that makes sense - I can see how close people are to human and you're strange, that way. If you take some people of a species and only let them make more people from themselves for a long time, like if they all went to a different planet and no other people of that species were there, then that group of people will slowly change kind, and that's how new species usually start. Or if you're using a thing to make a person you can do those changes right away, if you have the right skill. But you shouldn't be able to make magic that way; you can't even make sure someone can see the Force that way. I don't know where your magic came from, everything I know says nobody should be able to do that."

"Yeah, I don't think slow changes can make new species. Kittens now learn their first hundred words three deci-years faster than they used to, but the longest distance that catfolk can go from their flame is still exactly the same."

He nods. "If your magic doesn't change at all with time - if there are never kittens whose magic works a little bit differently than the people who made them and especially if all catfolks' magic is exactly the same - then it's not the kind of thing you can change that way. But I don't know how whoever made you did do it."

"If the Lei was trying to get more Jedi from me, please tell them that won't work - my kittens would be able to see the Force, probably, but they wouldn't be able to use it without learning the skill from me, and if they didn't learn their kittens wouldn't be able to see it, and I don't think the Lei should have Jedi." For one thing they'd most likely end up with Sith instead, though he's going to hold back on explaining that one, it seems fraught.