The foundations of the Republic shake. Many systems along the Rim express their dissatisfaction with the Galactic Senate.
The Senate calls for negotiated settlements and punitive tariffs to bring the Separatists back into line. These measures entrench the ill feeling in the Outer Rim. Many of the powerful corporations, among them the Trade Federation, win goodwill by refusing to collect the additional taxes. As tensions rise, there are signs of military buildup.
In the midst of it all, the Jedi receive a perplexing distress call, signed with the code of someone long missing and presumed dead. Jedi Master Elesse Vendar and her Padawan Anakin Skywalker are dispatched to investigate the coordinates in the mysterious message...
She can see the way Elesse responds to the new information, the new currents and flows adapting easily to the additional perspective.
With the clones, it felt like she was doing some smoothing, but that doesn't seem necessary with Elesse.
(She gets a bit distracted over how nice this feels - Elesse's mind is wonderful - lets that push her a bit more into the floating mindset...)
Though without a concrete task it's - easy to get muddled, to be unsure what she's working on, to just float and think at Elesse - to keep getting distracted, really.
"Okay. That was really nice. A bit - kind of like I just woke up and don't want to get out of bed."
"That's good." She hums thoughtfully. "Your presence was not intrusive. The information was... smooth."
"Good. It - did feel a lot different than it did the first time? Less focused, and... I think I was sharing more information overall, it was less blendy, and I wasn't giving any - nudges? The first time... It felt like a mix of moving myself, just when there was a lot of myself spread around, and telling the girls where they'd do best?" She hums. "I might've felt like I was moving myself because of the - blending? I don't think I was controlling anyone... But us making decisions based on our information felt like - some bigger me making decisions?"
"That may be a function of the number of people involved, or that there were so many very similar minds."
"Also I wasn't really being - careful, and I think the blending increased over time and helped us fight?"
Elesse nods.
"I would like you to practice the mindfulness exercises during your meditations, with a focus on the distinction between the Living Force and the Unifying Force. Understand the division between self and other, find the line on an instinctual level so that you cross it for your purposes and only when it serves you."
"Alright - that makes sense, with what I was thinking... It'll help me define my core, too, so I can always come back."
She ducks her head, smiling, a warm glow in her chest. (Elesse's so pretty. And also great in a lot of other ways. But salient to Anakin's teenage brain right now is 'pretty.')
"I'll try not to make more work for you rebuilding me, then," she says, teasingly.
Corellia's traffic control, when they get there, is reasonably efficient for such a busy planet, and they can dock on the surface in short order. The ship is left in the care of a contact who will see it returned to the Temple. Elesse and Anakin take public transport in the direction of the Jedi Enclave, a relic of a time when Corellians were more independently minded, even as Jedi, these days maintained as a haven for those who don't want to leave the Core Worlds but need a quieter place than Coruscant. Once Elesse determines no one is following them directly, they double back to the spaceport and buy tickets on a passenger liner to the Mid Rim whose stops include Ord Mantell. The accommodations are slightly cramped, but they still get a cabin to themselves.
Anakin keeps working on meditating, and defining herself, and reaching out in the Force then finding herself again. There's not a ton else to do.
It's time to debark soon enough. Ord Mantell, like many Mid Rim planets, is an odd mix of industrial and pastoral. Factories cluster in large cities near the spaceports and transit centers to receive materials mined on-world, with the rest of the surface area given over to vast tracts of droid-worked farms in the arable regions or left untouched otherwise. Small villages are nonexistent outside the minimum necessary to support mining operations; you either live and work in a city or on an isolated farmstead, the only organics for a hundred kilometers. Provided you have local contacts, places like these are excellent waypoints for smugglers, and the used ship business is very brisk.
There are a few storefronts specializing in that within spitting distance of the spaceport they land at, so they have some choice in what to buy.
A bit fortunate, because Anakin has opinions about ships. (And a good sense of people - even without the Force, she can fairly reliably spot which sellers are trying to pull something on them.) She has fun haggling and gossiping and flirting with sellers, deftly avoiding giving anything concrete away about their own past or goals without actually offering offense or sounding like she's hiding more than most people here do. She picks up bits of miscellaneous gossip, too, a mixture of local and regional and farther out.
She's able to narrow down a seller and a ship fairly quickly.
And with Elesse handling the credits, they are soon the proud owners of an only-slightly-battered freighter with a respectable turn of speed, decent shielding, and a pair of guns.
"I'm not sure if I should count this as a birthday present," she says as they leave the shop.