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?"

"...Require vastly less infrastructure to communicate from anywhere to anywhere, Obi-Wan.  If this idea works."

"It might require less complicated infrastructure, but it would be more expensive. Kyber is more valuable than the tech behind hypercomms, and you'd have to give a kyber crystal to each person."

"Valuable for what?  Weaponry?"

"That's not the use to which something as sublime as the Force is best put.  And you wouldn't need a crystal for each person, but instead each connection.  You could many-to-one relay."

"...you think a kyber crystal could let you communicate back and forth through the Force with someone else, even if they weren't holding a crystal themselves? And then you could relay messages to others?"

"...What?  How does that - no?  Just that on one end of a crystal-mediated connection, you could collect many comms at once."

"Oh, there are a couple broadcasters who have crystals, all over the galaxy, who communicate with each other? And then everyone else communicates with the nearest broadcaster through an ordinary network, and their messages are passed along?"

"That's generally the idea, yes.  And I do realize you're about to say I've invented hypercomm buoys all over again, but there are distinct advantages in being able to - connect any two points directly, rather than having to route through a chain of interruptable relays."

"But I don't think there's really a way to transform audio and video into signals through the Force. Maybe you could make a system for really important message where people just called a local Jedi and told them what to say to the Jedi on the other end, but that doesn't scale."

"...Obi-wan.  We have visions.  And besides, that no encoding schema exists now, does not mean an encoding scheme will never exist to transmit information by way of kyber; it just means we haven't made it yet."

"Well, I certainly wish you luck. I can help you experiment with sending messages, if you want."

"The offer's appreciated; I might want some help field-testing.  I half expect Mace thinks I'm going to run off to debate Dooku the second I set a remotely unsupervised foot out of the Temple or something."

"Are you?"

"...No?  That would be stupid.  I'm too Interesting to be let go if I get in the other Sith's hands.  I do think that it's bizarre that they won't let me talk to him, though.  I am firmly convinced that there is nothing the Dark Side can offer me; he's not going to change my mind on that.  What I do believe is that the Sith were onto something with the Force as liberator - but the Dark Side is..."

She trails off.

"You wouldn't know the word I'd use to describe it, I should hope.  But it's a slaver.  And I will have nothing to do with slavers.  I will not forge my own chains."

Obi-Wan finishes the lightsaber within a few hours. Most of the basic structure of the saber is the same as his first one, but the front is entirely redesigned, with the new nozzle and several modified buttons.

He tests it out. "This feels good! I don't know exactly what it is, but it just... fits in my hands really well. I'm going to try this with one of those new shields you got."

"That sounds like a good plan," she grins at him.  "I've always thought that the proper tool for a Jedi Guardian was a shield, more than a sword."