"There are dozens of Inquisition branches, but they are mostly in the same realm.

Neo Roma is 6 or 7 main realms and a few smaller ones.

How long is this trip? Do you need to take a break?"

That's not the worst news. Not the kind of thing that would distract the New Republic fleet too much from the Imperial Remnant. He might be able to handle this himself. It is the kind of thing the Jedi Order was for. 

"Couple of days, maybe a week. Hyperdrive mods are on the blink again, we're taking it nice and easy." 

They always are, but he's not as dumb as he looks and Luke might appreciate some time to think here without the kid's so-called mother showing up to shoot her. 

"Oh, um maybe we should take just a little break. Master Skywalker seems stressed.
And I need to go to the bathroom.

There's a tiny warning note of danger in the Force.

"I'm all right, Chuk. Just thinking. The 'fresher's through there."

He waits until she turns her back and gives Han a significant look, then closes his eyes and stretches out his awareness, feeling first the points of life in the room, the strange aura of something that surrounds Chuk, and slowly, dimly, everything else, the metal of the ship around him, the slightly-stale air of the cabin, even the vortex of hyperspace beyond.

*She comes back looking refreshed*

"I tried to think about what we don't know. Do you know you can't just get between realms with normal travel like with planets?

And I don't just mean it is too far.

I mean it's just not how that works."

"I guessed not, but thanks, I didn't know for sure. You said something about the 'old roads' - how do they work?"

"They are places where traveling a certain way can get you between realms. Like going up a pyramid on the right day after having come in the right direction while singing a song.

They are usually around big monuments, or places where there is a lot of normal travel.

But they are called old roads because most of them are very old. Sometimes new ones get made, but if anyone knows how they haven't told anyone."

He actually looked up teleportation once in the Imperial Archives, insofar as they could recover them. There are ancient legends about it, but they're probably not real - most of the early history of the galaxy is lost. Some of the Emperor's own writings, fragments of them, alluded to it as a rare Force power. 

(He can't do it. Not yet. He tried.)

None of it works like that, anyway. 

"Okay. Thank you for telling us, Chuk." 

He shifts to a meditation position, feeling the surface of the floor beneath him, and consciously lets his muscles relax, feeling points of tension and letting them melt into the Force. Parts of him are tired, parts still sore from Myrkr; he focusses attention on each one and then releases it until clarity flows through him. 

"Is there anything else you want to talk about? You've been through a lot."

And he stretches out his senses to feel for the - something - that surrounds her. It reminds him of the aura Jedi have, that brightness beyond vision, but... it's like that first day with Ben, a lifetime ago, an awareness of something he wasn't yet trained enough to understand. 

If he lets himself be at peace, clear enough inside to hear the Force - or something like it - what does it say to him?

The way that can be named is not the true way.

There is a thing and there are patterns of patterns in the thing. These are not separate things.

Following? Kinda but not really? Good.

The thing is a force and not the Force. The thing is Chuk's first and part of a web that binds life together second. Not merely her node in something that binds the galaxy together and, by implication, has parts for each person in the galaxy but her's first any webs second.

At the centre of it is a song of love and light, of healing and joy, and just general goodness.

Can songs dance? If so, the other songs dance. They love the song of light and its singer and are happy to dance to its tune. The strongest song is a song of purification.

The cleansing fire, which, as long as the singer sings, takes joy in removing disease, poison, and even injury, literal and physical, from people, so that they may be healthy by their own lights and those of its master. And, as a side note, it can be a light in the darkness, a warm campfire on a cold night, a Bunsen burner performing home experiments and amicable to being misused to make a hot choccy in the middle of the night.

Its one sadness is that a barrier prevents it from healing its own master.

It has no desire to be spread and consume others, because there are no people its master considers impurities in the world. But if such a category were to exist... it wants you to know that flesh burns.

It fits into the Force. Oddly, but from its perspective not uncomfortably.

It also has trails out to yet more places. Many of them are weak and distant. But one stands out, obviously: her mother's.

It has many subtle flavors on a single carrier, which strains to hold some of them. It says "hush little baby, don't say a word, Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird." It says "just because is bad guy doesn't mean is bad guy." It says "death is a mercy that brings an end to suffering." And, arguing with all of these, it says "copium" and hundreds of souls' last words chorus in agreement.

That was more successful than he expected. 

The thing is Chuk's. This girl is at the centre of something incredible, something vast and deeply, deeply important. 

He had had an awful question in the back of his mind, of if he really would stop her walking to her death to save countless others; a Jedi can't be so caught up in galactic worries that he stops seeing people in front of him, but who would he be to stop her, if she knew what her choice meant and made it?

Well, now he knows the answer. He isn't sure what happens if Violet shows up trying to take her back to die, but it certainly doesn't involve handing her over. 

Hopefully it won't come to that. 

Absently, he feels out along the shining line towards her mother, feeling for what could be there. 

As for the voices... It feels like a person's fears, fears of death and fears of life, and also their hopes, and the ways they hold off terror, all tangled. ...But not necessarily Chuk's fears, he doesn't think. It's all so... painfully human, for something so vast; it reminds him of the living Force. Ben and Yoda said little about death, and the visions he saw of them are even stranger. Does that happen to everyone? Or - should he be trying to teach the ways of the Jedi, desperately, to hold off oblivion... 

When you find yourself thinking terrible urgent thoughts like that, you let them go and come back again later; such a thought deserves calm. 

Well, one thing is obvious.

He takes a deep breath and lets it go, breathing out and not breathing in again, until the Force shines through him, and in the space between heartbeats he reaches out towards the - barrier, the master, the limits of this strange web.

Hello?

Wait wait wait is the living force saying hi again or is you trying to say hi to Chuk via intermediaries, because obviously you don't have the termidity to talk to someone else's song directly right? 

The death song would suddenly like to volunteer a gesalt of a great many cases of mothers killing men for being creepy at their daughter's. Many such cases.