Obi-Wan shows up eventually; he seems to have broken his lightsaber recently. "Hello, Kina. What are you working on?"

"...Something doesn't feel right," she says in reply.  "So I'm...trying to figure out what these kyber truly need to be.  ...Is yours alright?"

"The crystal's fine. My saber's been malfunctioning for a while, and whenever I try to fix it, something just breaks again a couple months later. Dropped it today and the generator exploded. I'm just going to take it apart and replace all the internal machinery."

"...Good grief."  That's not something that usually happens, or so she's been told.

"Well, if you need a hand or anything, let me know.  I'm going to be staring at these for a while, I bet, but that doesn't mean I don't have time to help a friend."

"If you can figure out what's broken, that would help. Although there's probably more than one thing broken."

He gets started on disassembling the saber.

"If the generator backfired so catastrophically, the power surge probably fried pretty much everything.  Lemme take a look..."

She leans over, looking with her eyes, and then there is an anticipatory question he feels in the Force - may she handle this blade?

Yeah, sure.

Most of the pieces are at least a little charred from the latest explosion, so it's a little hard to tell what's completely broken and what's just burnt.

The generator, of course, is entirely destroyed. The battery seems to be damaged somehow, although the diatium metal that makes it up is still worth salvaging. Most of the complex parts are on the other side of the saber and haven't been affected by the generator problems, although they still might be broken one way or another.

...The blade comes apart, piece by piece, hanging gently in midair as Kina inspects the damage, flicking the parts into different offsets based on their suitability for other use.

"Emitter shroud's fine, I think; obviously you know your kyber, some of the damaged parts are recyclable...  But really, you should make a new blade.  If this one keeps breaking down on you, it's really about time.  Possibly a sign, even.  It's not like the Force is always subtle about its plays."

"I've been through a lot with this saber, but... yes, it might be time. I don't really have much I want to change about the exterior at the moment. Maybe it should have a blade intensity adjustor knob; my current one's just one button that cycles between two settings."

"...I suppose it could be useful to have something that's not going to drain your capacitors by trying to cut through flimsiplast like durasteel."

"I'll go take a look at some of the parts that are available and get started sketching this up."

"...Sketching?"

She recovers from her surprise with admirable aplomb.

"I know lightsabers are highly intricate tools, and definitely having the blueprints on file isn't a bad plan, goodness knows I've taken down all the details of mine, but I was kind of under the impression that lightsabers essentially just happened to people.  That you had the kyber and the parts you used were just...what felt right around it."

"Well, I need to know what parts I'll be using beforehand to find ones that fit together, right? I guess I could try just... grabbing parts that feel right and seeing if the Force makes them fit."

He walks over to a bin of spare lightsaber parts, closes his eyes, and picks up a handful of pieces. They do not fit together, particularly because there are two emitter nozzles.

"...Because you're not doing it right.  I don't - "

"Okay.  So."  She breathes out.  "You have two emitter nozzles.  And you were listening to the guidance of the Force when you selected them," she says with more confidence than she rightly ought to have.  "So what does that imply?"

"Well, I can't make two sabers yet; I only have one kyber crystal. Are you suggesting I go out and try to get another one? I've studied dual-bladed combat before, but it never really felt right."

"...Impossible is merely what the Force has not yet shown us," she says instead.

"But you do have both a mind and a fully functioning connection to the Force, which I suggest might be more useful if they are combined."

Obi-Wan fiddles with the parts in silence, and ends up choosing one of the emitter nozzles over the other, placing the second one aside in case he does decide to build another saber.

"So what are you working on?" he eventually asks, while hammering together some of the external plating.

"Whatever most of these kyber crystals are meant for, doesn't seem like it's actually lightsabers.  Or it isn't solely lightsabers, at least; I'm feeling a couple things that could be used to cut in here, just - with a different primary design intent."

"Well, there are kyber-powered lightwhips and shields, and of course the blasters like the ones you made."

"The Sith Empire used them to power ships for a while, but they didn't work very well. It's pretty much impossible to combine more than four or five crystals into one power source beyond a certain size; it's something about the resonance between the crystals in the Force. So if you wanted to power a big ship, you would need to either have a hundred different generators that all independently provided power to the ship, or one of the largest crystals in the galaxy. There's a legend that Darth Tanis used a giant kyber crystal to power a temple on Malachor that turned Jedi to stone."

"...No, no.  Not...weapons.  Not weapons at all."

"And what else would you use kyber crystals for?"

"That's the question, now isn't it."

"...I'm mulling over a few things, but most of them do come back to 'power' or 'focusing'.  I'm definitely also building a shield emitter.  ...The most novel thought I've had is - something like a Force-mediated hypercomm; I do feel like I'm almost being nudged in that direction by something."

"That'd be cool! But what would it do that you can't do with a normal comlink?"