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blueskyingOOC INFORMATION
Name: Joysweeper
Are you over 15? Yeah...
Contact: Joysweeper on Plurk
Current characters in the game: n/a
IC INFORMATION
PREINCARNATION
Name: Luke Skywalker
Canon: Star Wars Legends
Age: fuck, somewhere post-death but we don’t actually know when he dies, just that his ghost is present about 140 years after his birth. As a ghost his apparent age changes as he can resemble any age he’s been, but usually hangs out around midthirties early forties.
Species: Human
Appearance: Let’s go with close to this. Luke’s a mid-short man with a lean build and a mechanical right hand, usually covered in synthetic skin and sometimes gloved.
At some point he went to a weird plane where he acquired a horrible wound in his neck which healed with large yellow slit-pupiled eyes inside. I mention this because I absolutely want to echo it.
History: Legends ran for decades in and out of universe. This is the barest skeleton, skipping many major events. If you want a much longer explanation, try here.
Luke and his twin sister Leia were born in space during a time of great upheaval. Their mother died, and the two were split up, Leia going to Alderaan with its senator, Luke taken to Tatooine by Obi-Wan Kenobi. Kenobi took him to be raised by Luke’s aunt and uncle, but remained at the periphery of his life. Owen and Beru loved their boy and feared for his future. Luke struggled to fit in with peers and longed for the stars, but was too dutiful to just run away.
When he was nineteen he met some of Leia’s droids, who had a message from her to Kenobi. Luke’s aunt and uncle were killed by the Empire; with nothing more to keep him there, Luke joined Kenobi and started on the path to becoming a Jedi like his father. They joined Han Solo and Chewbacca and left the planet, Kenobi died as they got Leia off the Death Star, they joined up with more of the Rebel Alliance, and Luke blew up the Death Star.
In the few years after that, Luke formed Rogue Squadron but often ranged away from it doing other things and discovering more about being a Jedi. He had a very black-and-white view of the world and a towering hero-worship of what he imagined his father had been like, both of which gradually started to show cracks.
The Rebel base on Hoth was discovered and beseiged, and after assisting the escape Luke went to Dagobah to train under Master Yoda, only to leave to try to save his friends at Bespin, only to lose his hand and Anakin’s lightsaber to Vader and hear the famous revelation that Darth Vader was his father. This shattered his self-image and caused him to dedicate himself even more fully to the Alliance and to Leia.
After being fitted with a new prosthetic hand a shaken Luke built a new lightsaber, had a thing with a member of Rogue Squadron who turned out to be an Imperial agent, and offered redemption to a human replica droid he’d defeated, then helped Leia rescue Han from a crime lord. Returning to Yoda as Yoda was dying, Luke discovered that Leia was his twin sister. On Endor he parted from his companions to confront Vader on his own, and Vader brought him to the Emperor. A fight ensued, and Luke stopped himself and rejected the Dark Side, and Vader saved him and killed the Emperor before dying himself. The Empire was roundly defeated, though not remotely done.
Luke went on mission after mission and trained his Jedi skills on Endor. He met dozens of young people who wanted Jedi training and turned them all down, because while he knew he had to pass on what he knew he was afraid to give it, afraid they’d turn to the dark side. Came to regret not training any of them when one became Dark Lord of the Sith under Lumiya, the agent who’d been part of Rogue Squadron. He and Lumiya fought repeatedly before she faded back into the shadows.
A year after Endor, Luke was at his most integrated into the Rebel Alliance military, serving as a General and increasingly dissatisfied with his role. He led a task force against a splinter of the Empire and had to kill so many people that when it was over he attempted to be tried for war crimes. He resigned his commission and, while he still often stepped in when the Alliance-slash-New Republic needed it, dedicated himself instead to travelling the galaxy to learn about the Jedi. Along the way he identified many other Force-Sensitives, and while he didn’t become Master to any of them he more freely shared advice and some lessons. One of these was an ex-Imperial agent named Mara Jade who initially wanted him dead.
After Obi-Wan’s spirit said its final farewells Luke tracked down rumors of a surviving Jedi Master, who turned out to be deranged and wicked and working for the Empire, and who cloned Luke without his knowledge or consent. He and Mara helped each other with that situation. At around that time, Leia had twins, Jacen and Jaina, and decided to have one more child.
About a year later the Empire resurged under a reborn Emperor, hopping between cloned bodies. Taken to face him, aware of the bodystealing power, Luke submitted to be his apprentice, planning to learn what he could and try and take him down from within. As soon as his treachery was discovered Luke was mindwhammied pretty badly. Leia, heavily pregnant, had to meet him and talk him free. After that Luke fought at her side, scooping up some of the Emperor’s other apprentices and random other Force-Sensitives to help him fight, and eventually the Emperor was defeated for good.
Recovering from this experience Luke declared himself a Jedi Master and decided at last to really try teaching the way of the Jedi. He gathered a class of students, twelve originally, on Yavin IV, for the Jedi Praxeum. Problems started almost immediately since he didn’t screen them all that well and had a very lax approach that didn’t work with everyone. Also, Yavin IV hosted the spirit of a long-dead Dark Lord of the Sith who was entirely happy to use these developing Force-Sensitives. Most notably an angry teenager, Kyp Durron, drew the spirit to himself and fled the Praxeum to kill several million people. Eventually the spirit was defeated. Luke took Kyp back in to continue training, to the dismay of basically everyone.
Luke never tried to bar someone from leaving, and he trusted that he could turn anyone who came looking for power for the wrong reasons. Often he could, but from then on, many Dark Jedi and self-proclaimed Lords of the Sith had had the benefit of his teaching, directly or through someone else he’d taught, and not all could be brought back as Kyp was.
The Praxeum was Luke’s home now, though he often left it for crises and to investigate potential students and teachers and Force traditions. He quickly found and welcomed as allies the clone of a Jedi and an entire order of secretive Jedi/Sith Force users, and fell for Callista Ming, a deceased Jedi who was able to take a new body and discovered her ability to touch the Force had been nearly severed in the process. He travelled with her for a time trying to rekindle the ability. It never worked, and eventually she left, sending rare messages about things she found that he might want to look out for.
At one point Luke led a team of fifty of his Jedi against a Sith cult and wiped them out, but had a personal crisis as well and decided to try becoming a hermit and contemplating the Force from seclusion. This only lasted a few months before he was drawn out by Akanah, a woman from an unusual Force tradition who claimed she had knowledge of his mother and would give it in exchange for his help. It turned out that she was lying, but the experience still drew Luke out of his isolation, and he returned to the Praxeum and an active role in events.
Ten years after meeting Mara Jade, after repeatedly working with her and splitting apart, she and Luke drew closer together during yet another crisis and were married, both in a private Jedi ceremony and a highly publicized union on Coruscant. Therafter while they often had their own lives, they faced most crises together.
Leia’s children - the twins Jacen and Jaina, and Anakin - were by then old enough in Luke’s view for training, and he was there at least part of the time for several of their adventures. In general though Luke tried to leave Praxeum life - there was more than one school by then - more up to others of his Jedi, declaring several of them Masters and trying to have a less central role in general.
Then extragalactic invaders rolled in and Luke had to step up and get more involved. The Jedi were the first line of defense but many were unprepared for a long war. The Yavin Praxeum was destroyed, and Anakin Solo and many other Jedi were killed. Mara became pregnant and gave birth to a boy she and Luke named Ben Skywalker, who they hid away for the crisis along with as many other Jedi children as they knew of. Leia gradually transitioned from secular politics to the Jedi. Forming a Jedi High Council and going to heroic efforts, Luke and his Jedi helped save the day and lead to peace. Luke established a new Praxeum on Ossus.
Over the next two decades there were issues with the role Jedi should have in the galaxy, including a whole mess with hive minds that incorporated Jedi going off in bad ways, and Luke declared himself a Jedi Grandmaster, the title Yoda had held, the better to make himself a central figure and soothe the various contentious factions in the Order. Lumiya returned after thirty-odd years, turned Jacen to the Dark Side, and stirred up trouble. Luke killed her, Jacen killed Mara Jade and took Ben captive, Luke rescued Ben and took him as his apprentice, and then for good measure took Jacen’s daughter Allana. Jaina killed Jacen.
In the aftermath, the galactic government decided Luke bore some responsibility he was sent into exile, so he and Ben roamed looking into Jacen’s travels, trying to see where he’d gone wrong. On the way they discovered that a kind of eldrich god called Abeloth was driving Force-Sensitives mad in order to use their bodies, and Luke and Ben had to team up with a lost tribe of Sith. Inevitably the Sith turned treacherous, but Luke and his Jedi managed to greatly weaken Abeloth. After that Luke and Leia went through a spacetime-warping gate to a very strange place, where they both died defeating enemies and then ceased to exist. Han called Leia back into being, and she called Luke back, and they got out of there and cordoned the gate off. Luke decided to try stepping back from such an active role in galactic affairs.
At some undefined point after that, Luke died and persisted as a spirit, guiding students and descendents for decades.
REINCARNATION
Name: Reverend Luke “Sky” Walker
Age: Sixty-six.
Appearance: Sky’s visibly getting old in a way Luke never really did. His joints bother him in certain weather, he’s not as lean as he used to be, he has glasses for reading. He’s in okay shape overall, he’s just not a Jedi.
He’s missing his right hand and uses a hand-shaped prosthetic (when appearances count) and a double-hook prosthetic (when practicality counts). He also favors his right leg, moreso when tired.
History: Orphaned in infancy, Luke was raised by an aunt and uncle, grain farmers in the American Midwest. He started going by Sky from a pretty young age. Sky grew up eager to leave and enthusiastically hero-worshipped his late father, who had been a soldier, an attitude encouraged by military recruitment efforts. A conservative hometown and general idiot enthusiasm left him completely unaware about the unpopularity and gray areas of the war going on. As soon as he was of age he’d signed up and managed to get into the US Air Force, and he did well in training.
Things went south basically the minute he was out of training. He hadn’t really thought about what he was doing and why and whether anything was actually right, he’d just trusted in authority and nationalism. A few months in, his focus shattered and his helicopter was shot down, leaving him injured. Sky was rescued, but his right hand had to be amputated in the aftermath. So ended his military career.
Badly shaken by the experience, once back in the States Sky engaged in heavy soul-searching and began questioning himself and his judgment. Even his faith wavered, and a cult went and snapped him up, though he wasn’t ever quite as confident in it and its leader, Paul Patine, as he might have seemed. A DEA agent and the sister Sky hadn’t known he had tried to contact him. He reached back and provided information, helping them crack the cult and sending Patine to prison.
Eventually he hooked up with that DEA agent and they had children. It was a happy partnership, but not particularly conventional - she very much had and has her own career and a powerful sense of her own independence and never wanted to marry, and Sky accepted this. Once the kids were above a certain age, it wasn’t uncommon for acquaintances to assume they were a divorced couple on friendly terms. Very friendly terms. Ahem. He’s not exclusive, but she’s the primary by far.
While exploring his own faith further Sky wound up part of a noncreedal nondenominational distant offshoot of Christianity called Unitarian Universalism. It doesn’t dictate much in the way of beliefs to its followers and emphasizes personal journeys and personal experience, and borrows from many other traditions. This sat better with him and in time Sky went to college and was ordained as a pastor. Every several years, the period of time is flexible, he’s moved to a new place and a new congregation.
Now and then Sky uses an assumed name to put out adventure novels, usually urban fantasy of some kind, which are entertaining but not excellent. He’s very proud of the (very low-profile) awards a couple of them got.
A couple years ago he got word of an opportunity to serve a congregation all the way in England and decided hey, why not? Actually taking that opportunity has been harder on him than he’d hoped, but he’s old enough that his children had moved out anyway, and he’s been adjusting with his signature optimism.
First Echo: Almost a year ago, coming and addressing his new congregation for the first time. This wasn’t the first time he’d had a new congregation, but it’s certainly further removed than previous ones, and it was enough to call up an indistinct memory of Luke’s first class at his Yavin Praxaeum - twelve people loosely united by their connection to something few really understand, a range of species and ages and attitudes, in a great stone Temple in a jungle.
Being Sky he’s outlining a book about them which is probably going to involve the power of friendship, and getting confused because twelve is a lot of characters to juggle and he doesn’t have much about any of them.
PERSONALITY
Pre-Incarnation Personality: Luke is a peace-loving person, but also very good at combat and takes pleasure in his own skill, which concerns him. He’s consciously worked to be centered, someone who expresses emotions but is not ruled by them, and by the later decades of his life feeling even irritation made him pause and take note. Few things can rouse his well-buried and -controlled temper. The big ones are injustice and threats to other people, particularly children. Luke has a very long, slow fuse. When it runs down he won’t lash out but he may act hastily.
In many ways, he takes after his mother. There’s a deceptive softness to him, a great deal of tolerance and willingness to let people go their own way. What’s right is just more important than what he wants or costs to himself. He’ll put his life on the line for nearly anyone. Luke also believes there’s good in nearly anyone. Cost to himself or how he’ll look doesn’t cross his mind.
Luke will forgive almost anything. Shirked responsibilities? Attempts on his life? Murder? Mundicide? Yep. Luke can sense sincerity. He does eventually recognize if someone is beyond redemption, and he knows that someone who he’s forgiven still has to answer for their deeds; when he forgives someone he doesn’t simply absolve someone of all guilt, but he does try to help them. He’s actually somewhat less forgiving and more wary than he used to be, Luke struggles a lot with understanding when it’s worse to offer a hand than to kill someone, but he’d still rather pull people back. Relatedly he tends to be very softhanded about discipline.
In a crisis, he’s almost preternaturally calm. Not just trained-to-handle-tense-situations-well calm, completely calm. Emotionally, Luke is very stable; he can move very fast if he must, but he seems unhurried. It’s extremely difficult to throw him, though it can happen. All the same, he feels more alive in emergencies.
He’s gracious, courteous, humble, and personable, even to beings not generally seen as people. This is the kind of person who’d say ‘thanks’ to an automated phone. There’s an assurance to him, and a quiet good humor. Luke is not threatening. Not unlike Obi-Wan, one of his default expressions is a faint, gentle smile. Luke’s sense of humor usually runs towards mildness and making understatements, but there’s a slight maliciousness to it. He likes to poke fun at arrogant pupils, and is often self-deprecating too.
Still, there’s a sort of heaviness to him. A touch of responsibility and old sorrow which are linked and never far from his thoughts, a degree of reserve. He has the kind of deliberation you’d see from someone who’s around a great many delicate objects, is aware of their fragility, and is very conscious not to break them. Luke’s got an inclination towards depression; his brushes with the Dark Side are always marked more by despair than rage.
Possibly because of that, Luke is quite calmly ready to die rather than turn to the Dark Side. To the point where, in a fight, if his only options are tapping into darker emotions to survive or letting his opponent kill him, like Obi-Wan did on the Death Star, he will pick the latter. A Jedi does not fear death, but welcomes it as an old friend; those who have died are one with the Force. He’s very spiritual, though he doesn’t often get into it.
Luke cares about just about everyone and especially several central people, but he struggles sometimes belonging long-term with a group. Even after settling into his role in the Order, Luke frequently left it if he could and was glad to temporarily not be directly responsible for people. In his late decades he acquired more and more responsibility, feeling duty-bound, but it was always because of a crisis.
Something Luke goes back and forth on is how to use his own powers. He can be kind of a showoff. However, dramatic physical uses of the Force also tend to drown out its subtler influences. Sometimes it’s better to let people struggle through things on their own and have their own agency than to step in and fix everything, and the free will even of enemies is worth something, but it’s still tempting. When possible he tries to compromise and ask permission beforehand.
Between his hesitation to use great powers, his calm, and his tendency to let people do as they wish, he can sometimes come off as ineffectual and out of touch.
Any differences?: Many fewer bad things have happened to Sky. Oh, his life has absolutely not been free of strife and tragedy, but the really awful stuff can all fit within a decade, his late teens to his late twenties. Since then really bad things have been much more limited in scope, and while he does still have that inclination to depression he’s not nearly as weighed down and is much more consistently optimistic.
Sky hasn’t had to be responsible for nearly as much, either. He’s been the primary parent for his children, and as a pastor he’s expected to care for the people who come to him, and he does fill those roles to the best of his ability, but overall he’s not as responsible a person as Luke became. He is a civilian.
Without Luke’s benefit of advanced medical technology and powers Sky is more aware of himself as disabled and suffers more pain from old injuries. He’s had a long time to get used to all of this, of course, and is pretty willing to go to people for help.
With this general lightness, Sky has a more open tendency towards creativity. He likes to write daring fiction and imaginative sermons, and enjoys other peoples’ artistic pursuits more fully and with less reserve than Luke did.
Sky’s a more humorous figure than Luke normally was. He likes dumb jokes, often involving hands, and gently trolling, and is happy to be the straight man for someone else’s jokes, or the butt for that matter.
Abilities:
Equipment: there’s been a lot of this in the short term let’s keep it to a handful of things
Powered abilities… Oh god. Look, one of Luke’s things is that he’s really good at learning new powers and repeatedly traveled the galaxy learning everything he could. He’s by far the most powerful good-aligned Force-user in his canon. And he’s been written by dozens of writers, some of whom feel like making up new powers on the fly, one of whom was angling to turn him into a god. I’m going to skip some that don’t make sense, and I’m not going to cover the Dark Side powers he could develop because that’s nearly all of them and I’m not interested in turning him to the Dark Side.
Baseline Force-Sensitivity means little without conscious development, but there's one physical sign of it: midichlorians, microbial mutualists distributed densely through the whole body. Without them Jedi discipline amounts to little but control of emotions and heart rate.
There are three base categories for Force powers, though they build on each other: Control, Sense, and Alter. The first two are required to have any proficiency in the third.
Control is shorthand for the control of one’s own body and mind.
Sense is extending awareness through the Force to the world outside of one’s body.
Alter physically affects the world.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLES
- 3rd person/action: It was a little unfortunate that the man who usually served as custodian was off the week of Flower Communion, which always, inevitably, meant tons of petals on the floor. Sky had known it was coming and asked for help before it actually happened - he’d made the joke about struggling to do it ‘single-handedly’ and grinned at the mix of indulgent chuckles and groans - but it wouldn’t be right to not work a little himself.
Once only he and his helpers were left in the building Sky picked up the vase of water and petals and random stems and a couple of forlorn smaller flowers, hefted it into the crook of his right elbow, and carried it outside as the noise of the vacuum started up. His five-fingered special occasions hand, which looked nice, couldn’t really handle the smoothness plus weight of the vase like his hooks or his real hand could, but hey, nothing wrong with the rest of the arm.
Even with modern emails and reminders in the weeks before, even though flowers for those who hadn’t brought any themselves were always provided, count on it that several people always snatched something blooming off of the church grounds. Which was, honestly, one reason to hold such a service at a time when everything was in flower. It certainly added local character to the great bouquet formed at the start of the service. Stepping carefully, Sky shifted his grip and poured out water under the tree that dripped with magenta blossoms, whose lower branches had endured so much snatching.
“I keep hearing it’s going to be a dry summer,” he said, not looking around first. Sky didn’t mind too much if people saw him talking to trees and inanimate objects. He had lighthearted excuses for that and more serious, spiritual reasons too, if anyone made a comment. “You’ll be alright, though.”
On his way back he stopped by his car to retrieve the broom he’d tucked into the trunk. Its handle had a rubbery wrap that made it easier for his prosthesis to grip than the ones usually kept inside. He could manage a bit with those anyway, but the tile foyer was pretty big and even with someone to help there was no reason to make it harder.
- 1st person/network:
From: Master Skywalker
To: the Masters of the Yavin Praxeum
First I want to thank Tionne for her hard work restoring Palpatine’s copy of The Jedi Path. When I saw the condition this volume was in I never thought we’d be able to salvage more than a few chapters, but our historian has gone above and beyond and nearly the entire work has been recovered. I’m deeply grateful to you.
It appears to be a textbook for young Jedi initiates explaining the teachings of the Order and the role of the Force, and was passed down from master to student for at least a century until the Purge, when Palpatine got his hands on it. As well as his commentary there’s marginalia written in it by my father, Ben Kenobi, Yoda, and several other Jedi. Since marking up one’s personal copy of this text was apparently a time-honored tradition for students of the Force I’m considering inserting my own notes.
There’s a lot to unpack in this book. I’d like to invite those of you who are interested, and any Knights you think might enjoy it, to discuss its contents amongst yourselves and with me. Holos can be provided. To see the original, please arrange things with Tionne, but not even I am permitted to just carry it off to study. You’ll have to do as I did and hang around in the archives.
I now understand that the old Order, as well as raising children as Jedi Initiates from a very young age, grouped them into ‘clans’ of ten to twenty when growing up, clans named after beasts. This clarifies a lot of other references like the ‘Thrantas’ and the ‘Heliosts’. Each was attended to by its own instructor and it appears that young children were sorted into these clans for reasons of personality or aptitude.
We’re not in the business of taking newborns to raise, but there are a lot of Force-Sensitive children about in and around our Temples. I wonder if clan identities, the support of their peers and a central teacher and so on, might benefit them. It’s possible that the Praxeum’s lack of such structures has something to do with our failure rate.
I’m proposing forming clan groups for children eight years and older. I believe the Knights Arranda, if they both agree, could be admirable central figures for one of them, but I’d welcome other thoughts.
Name: Joysweeper
Are you over 15? Yeah...
Contact: Joysweeper on Plurk
Current characters in the game: n/a
IC INFORMATION
PREINCARNATION
Name: Luke Skywalker
Canon: Star Wars Legends
Age: fuck, somewhere post-death but we don’t actually know when he dies, just that his ghost is present about 140 years after his birth. As a ghost his apparent age changes as he can resemble any age he’s been, but usually hangs out around midthirties early forties.
Species: Human
Appearance: Let’s go with close to this. Luke’s a mid-short man with a lean build and a mechanical right hand, usually covered in synthetic skin and sometimes gloved.
At some point he went to a weird plane where he acquired a horrible wound in his neck which healed with large yellow slit-pupiled eyes inside. I mention this because I absolutely want to echo it.
History: Legends ran for decades in and out of universe. This is the barest skeleton, skipping many major events. If you want a much longer explanation, try here.
Luke and his twin sister Leia were born in space during a time of great upheaval. Their mother died, and the two were split up, Leia going to Alderaan with its senator, Luke taken to Tatooine by Obi-Wan Kenobi. Kenobi took him to be raised by Luke’s aunt and uncle, but remained at the periphery of his life. Owen and Beru loved their boy and feared for his future. Luke struggled to fit in with peers and longed for the stars, but was too dutiful to just run away.
When he was nineteen he met some of Leia’s droids, who had a message from her to Kenobi. Luke’s aunt and uncle were killed by the Empire; with nothing more to keep him there, Luke joined Kenobi and started on the path to becoming a Jedi like his father. They joined Han Solo and Chewbacca and left the planet, Kenobi died as they got Leia off the Death Star, they joined up with more of the Rebel Alliance, and Luke blew up the Death Star.
In the few years after that, Luke formed Rogue Squadron but often ranged away from it doing other things and discovering more about being a Jedi. He had a very black-and-white view of the world and a towering hero-worship of what he imagined his father had been like, both of which gradually started to show cracks.
The Rebel base on Hoth was discovered and beseiged, and after assisting the escape Luke went to Dagobah to train under Master Yoda, only to leave to try to save his friends at Bespin, only to lose his hand and Anakin’s lightsaber to Vader and hear the famous revelation that Darth Vader was his father. This shattered his self-image and caused him to dedicate himself even more fully to the Alliance and to Leia.
After being fitted with a new prosthetic hand a shaken Luke built a new lightsaber, had a thing with a member of Rogue Squadron who turned out to be an Imperial agent, and offered redemption to a human replica droid he’d defeated, then helped Leia rescue Han from a crime lord. Returning to Yoda as Yoda was dying, Luke discovered that Leia was his twin sister. On Endor he parted from his companions to confront Vader on his own, and Vader brought him to the Emperor. A fight ensued, and Luke stopped himself and rejected the Dark Side, and Vader saved him and killed the Emperor before dying himself. The Empire was roundly defeated, though not remotely done.
Luke went on mission after mission and trained his Jedi skills on Endor. He met dozens of young people who wanted Jedi training and turned them all down, because while he knew he had to pass on what he knew he was afraid to give it, afraid they’d turn to the dark side. Came to regret not training any of them when one became Dark Lord of the Sith under Lumiya, the agent who’d been part of Rogue Squadron. He and Lumiya fought repeatedly before she faded back into the shadows.
A year after Endor, Luke was at his most integrated into the Rebel Alliance military, serving as a General and increasingly dissatisfied with his role. He led a task force against a splinter of the Empire and had to kill so many people that when it was over he attempted to be tried for war crimes. He resigned his commission and, while he still often stepped in when the Alliance-slash-New Republic needed it, dedicated himself instead to travelling the galaxy to learn about the Jedi. Along the way he identified many other Force-Sensitives, and while he didn’t become Master to any of them he more freely shared advice and some lessons. One of these was an ex-Imperial agent named Mara Jade who initially wanted him dead.
After Obi-Wan’s spirit said its final farewells Luke tracked down rumors of a surviving Jedi Master, who turned out to be deranged and wicked and working for the Empire, and who cloned Luke without his knowledge or consent. He and Mara helped each other with that situation. At around that time, Leia had twins, Jacen and Jaina, and decided to have one more child.
About a year later the Empire resurged under a reborn Emperor, hopping between cloned bodies. Taken to face him, aware of the bodystealing power, Luke submitted to be his apprentice, planning to learn what he could and try and take him down from within. As soon as his treachery was discovered Luke was mindwhammied pretty badly. Leia, heavily pregnant, had to meet him and talk him free. After that Luke fought at her side, scooping up some of the Emperor’s other apprentices and random other Force-Sensitives to help him fight, and eventually the Emperor was defeated for good.
Recovering from this experience Luke declared himself a Jedi Master and decided at last to really try teaching the way of the Jedi. He gathered a class of students, twelve originally, on Yavin IV, for the Jedi Praxeum. Problems started almost immediately since he didn’t screen them all that well and had a very lax approach that didn’t work with everyone. Also, Yavin IV hosted the spirit of a long-dead Dark Lord of the Sith who was entirely happy to use these developing Force-Sensitives. Most notably an angry teenager, Kyp Durron, drew the spirit to himself and fled the Praxeum to kill several million people. Eventually the spirit was defeated. Luke took Kyp back in to continue training, to the dismay of basically everyone.
Luke never tried to bar someone from leaving, and he trusted that he could turn anyone who came looking for power for the wrong reasons. Often he could, but from then on, many Dark Jedi and self-proclaimed Lords of the Sith had had the benefit of his teaching, directly or through someone else he’d taught, and not all could be brought back as Kyp was.
The Praxeum was Luke’s home now, though he often left it for crises and to investigate potential students and teachers and Force traditions. He quickly found and welcomed as allies the clone of a Jedi and an entire order of secretive Jedi/Sith Force users, and fell for Callista Ming, a deceased Jedi who was able to take a new body and discovered her ability to touch the Force had been nearly severed in the process. He travelled with her for a time trying to rekindle the ability. It never worked, and eventually she left, sending rare messages about things she found that he might want to look out for.
At one point Luke led a team of fifty of his Jedi against a Sith cult and wiped them out, but had a personal crisis as well and decided to try becoming a hermit and contemplating the Force from seclusion. This only lasted a few months before he was drawn out by Akanah, a woman from an unusual Force tradition who claimed she had knowledge of his mother and would give it in exchange for his help. It turned out that she was lying, but the experience still drew Luke out of his isolation, and he returned to the Praxeum and an active role in events.
Ten years after meeting Mara Jade, after repeatedly working with her and splitting apart, she and Luke drew closer together during yet another crisis and were married, both in a private Jedi ceremony and a highly publicized union on Coruscant. Therafter while they often had their own lives, they faced most crises together.
Leia’s children - the twins Jacen and Jaina, and Anakin - were by then old enough in Luke’s view for training, and he was there at least part of the time for several of their adventures. In general though Luke tried to leave Praxeum life - there was more than one school by then - more up to others of his Jedi, declaring several of them Masters and trying to have a less central role in general.
Then extragalactic invaders rolled in and Luke had to step up and get more involved. The Jedi were the first line of defense but many were unprepared for a long war. The Yavin Praxeum was destroyed, and Anakin Solo and many other Jedi were killed. Mara became pregnant and gave birth to a boy she and Luke named Ben Skywalker, who they hid away for the crisis along with as many other Jedi children as they knew of. Leia gradually transitioned from secular politics to the Jedi. Forming a Jedi High Council and going to heroic efforts, Luke and his Jedi helped save the day and lead to peace. Luke established a new Praxeum on Ossus.
Over the next two decades there were issues with the role Jedi should have in the galaxy, including a whole mess with hive minds that incorporated Jedi going off in bad ways, and Luke declared himself a Jedi Grandmaster, the title Yoda had held, the better to make himself a central figure and soothe the various contentious factions in the Order. Lumiya returned after thirty-odd years, turned Jacen to the Dark Side, and stirred up trouble. Luke killed her, Jacen killed Mara Jade and took Ben captive, Luke rescued Ben and took him as his apprentice, and then for good measure took Jacen’s daughter Allana. Jaina killed Jacen.
In the aftermath, the galactic government decided Luke bore some responsibility he was sent into exile, so he and Ben roamed looking into Jacen’s travels, trying to see where he’d gone wrong. On the way they discovered that a kind of eldrich god called Abeloth was driving Force-Sensitives mad in order to use their bodies, and Luke and Ben had to team up with a lost tribe of Sith. Inevitably the Sith turned treacherous, but Luke and his Jedi managed to greatly weaken Abeloth. After that Luke and Leia went through a spacetime-warping gate to a very strange place, where they both died defeating enemies and then ceased to exist. Han called Leia back into being, and she called Luke back, and they got out of there and cordoned the gate off. Luke decided to try stepping back from such an active role in galactic affairs.
At some undefined point after that, Luke died and persisted as a spirit, guiding students and descendents for decades.
REINCARNATION
Name: Reverend Luke “Sky” Walker
Age: Sixty-six.
Appearance: Sky’s visibly getting old in a way Luke never really did. His joints bother him in certain weather, he’s not as lean as he used to be, he has glasses for reading. He’s in okay shape overall, he’s just not a Jedi.
He’s missing his right hand and uses a hand-shaped prosthetic (when appearances count) and a double-hook prosthetic (when practicality counts). He also favors his right leg, moreso when tired.
History: Orphaned in infancy, Luke was raised by an aunt and uncle, grain farmers in the American Midwest. He started going by Sky from a pretty young age. Sky grew up eager to leave and enthusiastically hero-worshipped his late father, who had been a soldier, an attitude encouraged by military recruitment efforts. A conservative hometown and general idiot enthusiasm left him completely unaware about the unpopularity and gray areas of the war going on. As soon as he was of age he’d signed up and managed to get into the US Air Force, and he did well in training.
Things went south basically the minute he was out of training. He hadn’t really thought about what he was doing and why and whether anything was actually right, he’d just trusted in authority and nationalism. A few months in, his focus shattered and his helicopter was shot down, leaving him injured. Sky was rescued, but his right hand had to be amputated in the aftermath. So ended his military career.
Badly shaken by the experience, once back in the States Sky engaged in heavy soul-searching and began questioning himself and his judgment. Even his faith wavered, and a cult went and snapped him up, though he wasn’t ever quite as confident in it and its leader, Paul Patine, as he might have seemed. A DEA agent and the sister Sky hadn’t known he had tried to contact him. He reached back and provided information, helping them crack the cult and sending Patine to prison.
Eventually he hooked up with that DEA agent and they had children. It was a happy partnership, but not particularly conventional - she very much had and has her own career and a powerful sense of her own independence and never wanted to marry, and Sky accepted this. Once the kids were above a certain age, it wasn’t uncommon for acquaintances to assume they were a divorced couple on friendly terms. Very friendly terms. Ahem. He’s not exclusive, but she’s the primary by far.
While exploring his own faith further Sky wound up part of a noncreedal nondenominational distant offshoot of Christianity called Unitarian Universalism. It doesn’t dictate much in the way of beliefs to its followers and emphasizes personal journeys and personal experience, and borrows from many other traditions. This sat better with him and in time Sky went to college and was ordained as a pastor. Every several years, the period of time is flexible, he’s moved to a new place and a new congregation.
Now and then Sky uses an assumed name to put out adventure novels, usually urban fantasy of some kind, which are entertaining but not excellent. He’s very proud of the (very low-profile) awards a couple of them got.
A couple years ago he got word of an opportunity to serve a congregation all the way in England and decided hey, why not? Actually taking that opportunity has been harder on him than he’d hoped, but he’s old enough that his children had moved out anyway, and he’s been adjusting with his signature optimism.
First Echo: Almost a year ago, coming and addressing his new congregation for the first time. This wasn’t the first time he’d had a new congregation, but it’s certainly further removed than previous ones, and it was enough to call up an indistinct memory of Luke’s first class at his Yavin Praxaeum - twelve people loosely united by their connection to something few really understand, a range of species and ages and attitudes, in a great stone Temple in a jungle.
Being Sky he’s outlining a book about them which is probably going to involve the power of friendship, and getting confused because twelve is a lot of characters to juggle and he doesn’t have much about any of them.
PERSONALITY
Pre-Incarnation Personality: Luke is a peace-loving person, but also very good at combat and takes pleasure in his own skill, which concerns him. He’s consciously worked to be centered, someone who expresses emotions but is not ruled by them, and by the later decades of his life feeling even irritation made him pause and take note. Few things can rouse his well-buried and -controlled temper. The big ones are injustice and threats to other people, particularly children. Luke has a very long, slow fuse. When it runs down he won’t lash out but he may act hastily.
In many ways, he takes after his mother. There’s a deceptive softness to him, a great deal of tolerance and willingness to let people go their own way. What’s right is just more important than what he wants or costs to himself. He’ll put his life on the line for nearly anyone. Luke also believes there’s good in nearly anyone. Cost to himself or how he’ll look doesn’t cross his mind.
Luke will forgive almost anything. Shirked responsibilities? Attempts on his life? Murder? Mundicide? Yep. Luke can sense sincerity. He does eventually recognize if someone is beyond redemption, and he knows that someone who he’s forgiven still has to answer for their deeds; when he forgives someone he doesn’t simply absolve someone of all guilt, but he does try to help them. He’s actually somewhat less forgiving and more wary than he used to be, Luke struggles a lot with understanding when it’s worse to offer a hand than to kill someone, but he’d still rather pull people back. Relatedly he tends to be very softhanded about discipline.
In a crisis, he’s almost preternaturally calm. Not just trained-to-handle-tense-situations-well calm, completely calm. Emotionally, Luke is very stable; he can move very fast if he must, but he seems unhurried. It’s extremely difficult to throw him, though it can happen. All the same, he feels more alive in emergencies.
He’s gracious, courteous, humble, and personable, even to beings not generally seen as people. This is the kind of person who’d say ‘thanks’ to an automated phone. There’s an assurance to him, and a quiet good humor. Luke is not threatening. Not unlike Obi-Wan, one of his default expressions is a faint, gentle smile. Luke’s sense of humor usually runs towards mildness and making understatements, but there’s a slight maliciousness to it. He likes to poke fun at arrogant pupils, and is often self-deprecating too.
Still, there’s a sort of heaviness to him. A touch of responsibility and old sorrow which are linked and never far from his thoughts, a degree of reserve. He has the kind of deliberation you’d see from someone who’s around a great many delicate objects, is aware of their fragility, and is very conscious not to break them. Luke’s got an inclination towards depression; his brushes with the Dark Side are always marked more by despair than rage.
Possibly because of that, Luke is quite calmly ready to die rather than turn to the Dark Side. To the point where, in a fight, if his only options are tapping into darker emotions to survive or letting his opponent kill him, like Obi-Wan did on the Death Star, he will pick the latter. A Jedi does not fear death, but welcomes it as an old friend; those who have died are one with the Force. He’s very spiritual, though he doesn’t often get into it.
Luke cares about just about everyone and especially several central people, but he struggles sometimes belonging long-term with a group. Even after settling into his role in the Order, Luke frequently left it if he could and was glad to temporarily not be directly responsible for people. In his late decades he acquired more and more responsibility, feeling duty-bound, but it was always because of a crisis.
Something Luke goes back and forth on is how to use his own powers. He can be kind of a showoff. However, dramatic physical uses of the Force also tend to drown out its subtler influences. Sometimes it’s better to let people struggle through things on their own and have their own agency than to step in and fix everything, and the free will even of enemies is worth something, but it’s still tempting. When possible he tries to compromise and ask permission beforehand.
Between his hesitation to use great powers, his calm, and his tendency to let people do as they wish, he can sometimes come off as ineffectual and out of touch.
Any differences?: Many fewer bad things have happened to Sky. Oh, his life has absolutely not been free of strife and tragedy, but the really awful stuff can all fit within a decade, his late teens to his late twenties. Since then really bad things have been much more limited in scope, and while he does still have that inclination to depression he’s not nearly as weighed down and is much more consistently optimistic.
Sky hasn’t had to be responsible for nearly as much, either. He’s been the primary parent for his children, and as a pastor he’s expected to care for the people who come to him, and he does fill those roles to the best of his ability, but overall he’s not as responsible a person as Luke became. He is a civilian.
Without Luke’s benefit of advanced medical technology and powers Sky is more aware of himself as disabled and suffers more pain from old injuries. He’s had a long time to get used to all of this, of course, and is pretty willing to go to people for help.
With this general lightness, Sky has a more open tendency towards creativity. He likes to write daring fiction and imaginative sermons, and enjoys other peoples’ artistic pursuits more fully and with less reserve than Luke did.
Sky’s a more humorous figure than Luke normally was. He likes dumb jokes, often involving hands, and gently trolling, and is happy to be the straight man for someone else’s jokes, or the butt for that matter.
Abilities:
Equipment: there’s been a lot of this in the short term let’s keep it to a handful of things
- Lightsabers, various. Most prominently, his father’s blue one and the green one he first constructed for himself, but he’s prominently used five and has constructed and handled many more. Please don’t ask me to describe all of them.
- Various Jedi robes, no special properties they just look cool.
- An X-34 landspeeder, basically a large car that floats up to a meter above the ground and can go double highway speeds.
- A T-16 Skyhopper, 5 meters long, capable of full flight and much higher speeds, armed with a canon. Not likely to show up.
- An X-Wing, 12.5 meters long with heavy armnaments and shielding. Super not likely to show up.
- The Jade Shadow. Highly, highly unlikely to show up, it’s a 70 ton starship more than 50 meters long, but I wanted to mention it.
- Toy models of ships, including the three above.
- Numerous variations on Luke’s prosthetic right hand, from the original seen at the end of ESB to the large one the Emperor Reborn gave him that was a reconfigured Vader hand to the replacement of the original’s model to a new one. The grip is slightly better than flesh hands, they all have multiple power sources some of which can be used for other things, they’re all resistant to radiation, most are covered in synthetic skin, but they’re not hugely special.
- Tools to maintain the above, about a half kilogram of various instruments and oils kept in a kitbag.
- Decent mechanic, can maintain things.
- Facility for languages (knows… seventeen, good grief)
- Expert pilot
- Able to improvise and think on his feet
- Tough and resilient
- Pretty good at unarmed combat
- Probably the best at lightsaber combat in canon, able to learn from an opponent and use those same moves against them in the same battle.
Powered abilities… Oh god. Look, one of Luke’s things is that he’s really good at learning new powers and repeatedly traveled the galaxy learning everything he could. He’s by far the most powerful good-aligned Force-user in his canon. And he’s been written by dozens of writers, some of whom feel like making up new powers on the fly, one of whom was angling to turn him into a god. I’m going to skip some that don’t make sense, and I’m not going to cover the Dark Side powers he could develop because that’s nearly all of them and I’m not interested in turning him to the Dark Side.
Baseline Force-Sensitivity means little without conscious development, but there's one physical sign of it: midichlorians, microbial mutualists distributed densely through the whole body. Without them Jedi discipline amounts to little but control of emotions and heart rate.
There are three base categories for Force powers, though they build on each other: Control, Sense, and Alter. The first two are required to have any proficiency in the third.
Control is shorthand for the control of one’s own body and mind.
- Enhance Senses: Choose a sense (ex: hearing) and strengthen it or cut it off. Can enhance scent to the point of being able to track.
- Enhance Short-Term Memory: Scroll backwards through short-term memory to review in great detail
- Enhance strength
- Enhance speed/reflexes
- Breath Control: Forgo the need to breathe for a time.
- Curata Salva, the subheading for healing powers, all can be applied to other people once Alter is grasped.
- * Detoxify poisons, control disease, control pain
- * Enter a hibernation trance that looks like death and can last for months, the body focuses all its energy on healing. Other healing methods work more easily.
- * More immediate Force-healing. Fatal wounds can be fixed in a matter of hours.
- Tutaminis, the subheading for control of energy
- * Control heat - keep warm in the cold, walk on lava unharmed
- * Encase self in a field that absorbs and reuses the energy of blaster bolts, electricity, or someone else’s energy-based powers.
Sense is extending awareness through the Force to the world outside of one’s body.
- Farsight: Meditate to experience visions of the past, the present, or much vaguer inklings of the possible future. Can also be used involuntarily in dreams.
- Prima Vitae, the subheading for detecting life, for feeling the presence of living things at long or short range, especially beings. Luke passively ‘hears’ people as having unique presences that reflect their moods and intentions like a second face once he learns to read each individual.
- * Active thought-reading and memory-scanning, easiest when the target is close, ideally either within touching distance or making eye contact.
- * Comprehend speech: Understand people even if they speak an unknown language, or can’t speak at all.
- Tactis Otium, sensing the Force and energy in general
- * “See” clearly in darkness, through mist, while blinded. Never fully under conscious control.
- * Precognition. The simplest form is just a warning of impending danger. More complex forms are like visions of the immediate future or a faint whisper, and allow anticipating what an opponent will do before they do it. This plus Jedi reflexes allows the interception of blaster bolts.
- * Shatterpoint: Observe something in the Force and apply their will to it, then find its weakest point and destroy it with physical ease. I think for Luke this only applies to physical items.
- * Sense mass death and when loved ones are in danger.
- Projective Telepathy: Contact and speak to someone mind-to-mind, easier when this is someone the user is emotionally close to/psychic themselves.
- * Jedi meld: Link multiple psychics to temporarily become one mind in multiple bodies, making participants a gestalt entity that is stronger, faster, and better coordinated. If the component minds can’t agree it becomes more of a liability.
- Psychometry: touch something and understand something about its last user, track people by the psychic traces they recently left on their environment.
Alter physically affects the world.
- Telekinesis: At maximum, capable of precision on a large scale (freezing every crumb and droplet of a massive food fight in place for a prolonged period, until consciously releasing everything) and immense power (knocking over an AT-AT). Luke is able to control the fall from orbit of himself and an ally so they land gently, and to leap crazy far, and levitate.
- Mind Alteration
- * Mind Trick: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”. Works best on someone distracted or otherwise impaired, and if the command is something small. “Pay me more” and “You’ve already checked this” is much easier and less risky than “Turn on your friends”. If it fails the target is instantly suspicious.
- * Create Friendship: Communication plus an emotional push that makes the target inclined to try to please the user. I’m lumping “make friends with animals” and “command parasitic worms to leave a body” into that.
- ** Luke can demoralize an enemy who feels conflicted about fighting him, reaching out and influencing their mental state, making them more inclined to disengage and run or work things out.
- * Illusion: Create a full-sensory illusion. There’s the small version, making himself look different, and much much larger versions that I don’t think I’ll ever give him.
- * Memory Rub: Removing recent memories, leaving a blankness.
- * Mnemotherapy: Very precisely visualizing and eradicating selected memories from a target’s mind, possibly altering them greatly. Once used to free Callista’s willing spirit from Abeloth, allowing her to finally pass on and wounding the creature.
- Revitalize: Refresh and re-energize a weary, injured, or unconscious being, possibly causing some healing.
- Fold Space: teleport an object, person, or one’s self instantly over vast distances. Must have been to this place and be able to visualize it clearly. Also, can be used to prevent someone else from using teleportation.
- Blood Trail: Mark a target with the user’s blood and track them, however far they’ve gone.
- Light: Glow with a golden light that weakens and hurts dark-aligned things and can destroy spirits. Can cause blasts of golden “flames”.
- Oneness: Total union with the Force while still living. Brief omniscience, perfect calm and joy, physically becomes a maelstrom of luminescent energy giving off Light, unstoppable. This cannot be consciously activated or counted on, it’s excruciatingly rare.
- Body dissolving upon death, consciousness surviving in the Force.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLES
- 3rd person/action: It was a little unfortunate that the man who usually served as custodian was off the week of Flower Communion, which always, inevitably, meant tons of petals on the floor. Sky had known it was coming and asked for help before it actually happened - he’d made the joke about struggling to do it ‘single-handedly’ and grinned at the mix of indulgent chuckles and groans - but it wouldn’t be right to not work a little himself.
Once only he and his helpers were left in the building Sky picked up the vase of water and petals and random stems and a couple of forlorn smaller flowers, hefted it into the crook of his right elbow, and carried it outside as the noise of the vacuum started up. His five-fingered special occasions hand, which looked nice, couldn’t really handle the smoothness plus weight of the vase like his hooks or his real hand could, but hey, nothing wrong with the rest of the arm.
Even with modern emails and reminders in the weeks before, even though flowers for those who hadn’t brought any themselves were always provided, count on it that several people always snatched something blooming off of the church grounds. Which was, honestly, one reason to hold such a service at a time when everything was in flower. It certainly added local character to the great bouquet formed at the start of the service. Stepping carefully, Sky shifted his grip and poured out water under the tree that dripped with magenta blossoms, whose lower branches had endured so much snatching.
“I keep hearing it’s going to be a dry summer,” he said, not looking around first. Sky didn’t mind too much if people saw him talking to trees and inanimate objects. He had lighthearted excuses for that and more serious, spiritual reasons too, if anyone made a comment. “You’ll be alright, though.”
On his way back he stopped by his car to retrieve the broom he’d tucked into the trunk. Its handle had a rubbery wrap that made it easier for his prosthesis to grip than the ones usually kept inside. He could manage a bit with those anyway, but the tile foyer was pretty big and even with someone to help there was no reason to make it harder.
- 1st person/network:
From: Master Skywalker
To: the Masters of the Yavin Praxeum
First I want to thank Tionne for her hard work restoring Palpatine’s copy of The Jedi Path. When I saw the condition this volume was in I never thought we’d be able to salvage more than a few chapters, but our historian has gone above and beyond and nearly the entire work has been recovered. I’m deeply grateful to you.
It appears to be a textbook for young Jedi initiates explaining the teachings of the Order and the role of the Force, and was passed down from master to student for at least a century until the Purge, when Palpatine got his hands on it. As well as his commentary there’s marginalia written in it by my father, Ben Kenobi, Yoda, and several other Jedi. Since marking up one’s personal copy of this text was apparently a time-honored tradition for students of the Force I’m considering inserting my own notes.
There’s a lot to unpack in this book. I’d like to invite those of you who are interested, and any Knights you think might enjoy it, to discuss its contents amongst yourselves and with me. Holos can be provided. To see the original, please arrange things with Tionne, but not even I am permitted to just carry it off to study. You’ll have to do as I did and hang around in the archives.
I now understand that the old Order, as well as raising children as Jedi Initiates from a very young age, grouped them into ‘clans’ of ten to twenty when growing up, clans named after beasts. This clarifies a lot of other references like the ‘Thrantas’ and the ‘Heliosts’. Each was attended to by its own instructor and it appears that young children were sorted into these clans for reasons of personality or aptitude.
We’re not in the business of taking newborns to raise, but there are a lot of Force-Sensitive children about in and around our Temples. I wonder if clan identities, the support of their peers and a central teacher and so on, might benefit them. It’s possible that the Praxeum’s lack of such structures has something to do with our failure rate.
I’m proposing forming clan groups for children eight years and older. I believe the Knights Arranda, if they both agree, could be admirable central figures for one of them, but I’d welcome other thoughts.
