Chapter Text
Tarkin strode off down the corridor like a predatory obelisk, the Force around him exuding cold satisfaction. Plo lingered in the anteroom where he’d been handling some last-minute flimsiwork, then went out, approaching Chester.
He’d caught the latter half of the conversation between Tarkin and the Commander, watching from the half-open doorway. He had expected an argument at best. He had not expected her to simply start lying━the good Commander had shown a far greater inclination to blunt honesty thus far.
He had not expected her to be quite so good at it, either. Even to a Jedi, the shift in her presence had been subtle, hidden away behind the near-opaque layer of her shields. But she wasn’t completely cut off from the Force, even so fiercely guarded, and the flow of energy around her began to ripple, like a still pond in a sudden gentle breeze.
Plo noted with a pang of nostalgia the resemblance to another fallen friend. Qui-Gon the maverick had always been honest in his chaos. Micah Giiett had been their resident banthashit artist.
Chester, it seemed, was similarly accomplished in that field.
He waited until Tarkin was well and truly away before he slipped into the room. Chester was staring out the window, her hands clasped tightly behind her and a grim expression as she surveyed the wavering light of hyperspace.
“The Admiral is well away,” he said. “I am curious about your aim in that interaction. You have not heretofore placed a high value on civility in your previous conversations with him.”
Chester looked as close to ashamed of herself as Plo had ever seen. “Oh. You saw that, didn’t you.”
“At least some of it,” Plo said, truthfully.
Chester drew a long breath in, positively hangdog. “There’s a time and a place to lie like a rug,” she said, “and that seemed to be it. Can’t say I’m feeling particularly proud of myself for it, though.” She made a face. “He’s requested my assistance with Krell. Apparently Krell’s been saying he doesn’t want to talk to anyone but me, and Tarkin would like to have me… assist.” She looked directly at Plo, her gaze sharp. “Should I?”
Plo frowned deeply beneath his mask. “I shouldn’t think there is a pressing need for it.”
“I wouldn’t either,” said Chester, with a heavy sigh, “and frankly, I think it’s some sort of loyalty test. The happier I keep him, the simpler it is for the Jedi, and for me, and the more he thinks I’m a self-interested coward, the less of a threat he’ll see me as. Playing along benefits all of us, but I’m not sure how far I should be willing to go. I am missing a great deal of context about this galaxy, and he is no doubt aware of this and taking full advantage.”
“No doubt,” said Plo, dry. He folded his arms. “Do you plan to cooperate further?”
“I’ll see how useless I can be where Krell is concerned,” she said. “Tarkin thinks I’m a power hungry idiot without much brain, and with a self-righteous streak a kilometer wide, or at least I hope he does, because he should see a kindred spirit in that.”
“I suspect you may have succeeded in that aim. He certainly felt very pleased with himself.”
Chester’s lips curved in a half-hearted smile. “Here’s hoping.”
An hour later found them in the detention level, something uncomfortably familiar to Chester. There was a pretty blatant and painful irony at work here, too, and she wished it would give it a rest.
If she were entirely honest with herself, there was no small part of her that very much wanted to rub Krell’s nose in her victory. She remembered all too well the look in Dulcet’s eyes, the flat loss of hope, and how angry she’d been on his behalf.
But there would be no point to it. It wouldn’t help any of the people the bastard had already victimized, and it wouldn’t do anything to help the other clones still at risk of falling into a similar situation. It wouldn’t even get Chester back the hours of sleep the damned shock collar had stolen.
And she rather doubted Krell had any actionable intelligence that could be tempted out of him by her presence. No, this was purely to cover her ass regarding Tarkin, and that did not sit at all well with her.
But if she tried to fob him off, even politely, he’d immediately interpret that as a threat. Especially since the other person who’d pissed her off in her first hours here was currently sitting in that detention cell. The third person who’d really annoyed her recently, Dooku, was nursing a bruised ego, among other things. Tarkin, sensing any unfriendliness from her, would move immediately to eliminate her as a political opponent. She couldn’t even call him an idiot for doing so. She’d shown herself to be a threat, a serious one, and if she wasn’t going to act like she was interested in making up and playing nice, she’d better have a plan to utterly and completely humiliate him before he could make his move–and she rather doubted he’d stop at mere embarrassment.
She did not have such a plan.
There he was, waiting, smug and gray. “Commander Chester. How kind of you to join us.”
“As requested, Admiral,” she said. “What do you need me to do?”
“Pong Krell has stated he will speak with you and you only,” he said. “Any information about his defection or motivations for it will be most welcome. Walk with me.”
She nodded again and followed, clasping her hands behind her back. “I doubt he has much information of value, Admiral. His desires largely centered on his own safety, and I doubt he was in contact with any Separatist agents.”
“That remains to be seen. At this juncture, information of any sort is badly needed. Here we are.” He stopped at a doorway, gestured her through it. “We will be watching from here,” he said as they went in; it was a small observation room with a screen showing a security feed of the adjacent set of cells. In one of them, behind a glowing forcefield, Krell paced.
“So I go in, and see what he says,” said Chester. “Not the most organized debriefing. I have many specialties, Admiral, but interrogation is not one.”
His smile was profoundly condescending. “I assure you, you will be perfectly safe, Commander.”
It wasn’t her physical safety she was worried about. “Your concern does you credit, Admiral, but is unnecessary.” She glanced sidelong at Plo. She was not pleased about this, and she was feeling less pleased about it by the second. “Very well. I’m ready.”
Tarkin gestured at one of the technicians, who showed her out into the corridor. Plo followed her. She could feel his unease from here, and she was pretty sure it had little to do with her newfound Force sensitivity. A small group of clones had gathered there–her squad, she noted, and Dulcet, standing with his arms crossed.
“If I can get anything out of Krell, Commander Dulcet deserves an explanation,” she said to the technician and to Plo. “Could you see what you can do?”
“I will do what I can,” said Plo. “Commander, be careful. His connection to the Force is attenuated, and he should not be able to injure you. But by no means should you be complacent.”
In other words he trusted Tarkin’s evaluation of the safety of this venture about as much as she did. “Understood,” she said, and the technician keyed open the door.
Chester stepped through, noting with a prickle of unease that this was all but identical to the cell she’d been in, only on the other side of the forcefield. She could pinpoint the spot he’d hurled the clone, or the equivalent spot. And the unpleasant, unsettled feeling that made her skin crawl was much the same.
In the cell, Krell had gone very still, watching her with bright, febrile eyes. She walked up to the forcefield and stopped there. “Krell. You wanted to talk to me.”
He shook his head. “No. I wanted to see you gloat. It won’t last long. Because I know the truth about you. They certainly like you now. You know it’s going to change. But for now , I wanted to see you gloat.”
Chester folded her arms and raised an eyebrow at him. “Because that’s what you would do in my position?”
He started pacing, his intent gaze radiating menace. It was meant to intimidate, but to Chester it seemed almost sad–an animal in a too-small cage. “You might be on that side of the forcefield now, but I learned far more from our confrontation than I think you could ever anticipate. You lack power. Your fumblings in the Force are like those of a child. Your lack of training leaves you unequal even to the weakest Initiate. And yet, you caught Darth Tyranus’s attention. Not me–you.”
“Why would you want his attention?”
“Don’t you see?” He leaned in close, trying to loom; she just looked up at him. “You’re met him, you know his power, only by becoming his apprentice could I–”
“Could you hope to survive,” she said softly, picking up the thick and rusty undercurrent of fear in his voice, the powerful riptide that had dragged him into this in the first place. She’d tasted something like it for herself once; the Borg Cube bearing down on Earth after Wolf 359. The cube had gone through the best of Starfleet like tissue paper. Evacuating the planet had been out of the question–there’d been no time. Starfleet had mobilized ground forces, including Chester and her Academy class, but everyone had known it wasn’t going to do any good. You only had a handful of shots at Borg with your phaser on a single setting; set your phaser to randomize its settings and frequencies, and eventually they’d adapt to predict them, and they would keep coming the entire time. They weren’t going to stop until the entire planet was either dead or Borg, and Chester remembered looking up at the sky and the cube there they couldn’t see yet, and sincerely hoping she’d be lucky enough to end up dead. The sense of something implacable and strange against which she was so completely helpless–a thing that didn’t want her dead as much as it wanted to subsume her entire self –that had been terrifying in a way the Dominion or even Dooku couldn’t hope to match. Dooku could very well have tortured her to death. Assimilation by the Borg meant never being alone in her own mind ever again, never having her own self again–just the endless horror of being part of the Borg Collective’s consciousness, mind and body a simple extension of the Collective’s will, being used to do the exact same thing to every other innocent in its path, an unending hell that would only conclude when she was too badly damaged to be worth maintaining, and her husk was stripped for parts and whatever remained was finally allowed to die.
She’d take Sith torture any goddamn day over that.
But Krell didn’t know about the Borg, and Chester knew, on an intellectual level, that there were people who found death as terrifying as she found assimilation. Those people didn’t tend to last very long in Starfleet; she was a little surprised that he’d lasted this long as a Jedi.
It did nothing to make her like him any better. Death was the enemy, and you did not willingly feed people into its maw to save your own skin.
However, she was here to get information, not to get into an existential-horror-measuring contest.
“You’ve seen him,” he was saying. “You know what he’s capable of, even someone as ignorant of the Force as you must have recognized it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Chester, absolutely unable to resist, “but is that you acknowledging I might not be Song Tulin?”
He snorted. “From the moment I felt your pathetic attempt to draw on the Force. Even she would not be so incompetent.”
“I see,” she said. “Aren’t you worried that she’s still out there, ready to steal your place?”
“No. Dooku would not have turned his attention to you if she were.”
Chester was strongly reminded of the old saying that even a broken clock could be right twice a day.
“I’m going to have to kill you,” he said, conversationally.
If he had been expecting a reaction, he was out of luck. Chester had had a lot of people casually tell her they were going to kill her, many even before she’d come to this galaxy. She gave him a thoughtful look, in which no feeling but mild curiosity was evident. “Oh?”
“You may not be Tulin, but you took her place all the same.” He laughed at her blank expression. “That was a nice story you fed the Council. It’s especially lucky for you that they swallowed it. Even though it’s clearly a lie. Someone with your modest gifts would never have defeated a Sith lord, not by trickery like that.” He stepped forward again. Chester did not fall back. She folded her hands behind her back, shifting her weight to make herself look a little more relaxed, and lifted a sardonic eyebrow at him.
“You’re so fond of those clones,” he said caressingly, his tone carrying a wealth of obscene implications. “You don’t even have the decency to hide it. I’m sure Dooku took one look at them and knew exactly how he could turn you.”
“He certainly tried,” she said. “Unfortunately for him, he put pressure on the wrong end of the lever.”
“Did he really?” Looking into his eyes–uncomfortable, there was something just wrong with them–she realized this was temporary, a plateau of reasonable amusement between troughs of rage. She remembered, uneasily, her own feelings in Dooku’s care, careening between anger and fear. Krell was still at an intermediate point on that path, and Chester was in that moment utterly certain she did not want to go down it at all. “You’re from a backwards galaxy without any concept of the Force. You’re untrained, and you’re stupid , and you expect us to believe that when Dooku offered you power, you turned it down, humiliated him, and ran for it? Please.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve watched you, I’ve sensed your rage, you like power. You like it a lot .”
“Yes,” said Chester evenly, because there was no sugarcoating it; she had been on speaking terms with her own ambition a long time now. “I do. But that desire does not rule me. And I do not pursue it at the expense of others’ pain.”
He shook his head, amused and condescending with the rage burning behind it, eating away his reasonable facade. He’d been gone a long time now, hiding it, or her victory and this conversation were pushing him over the edge with horrifying speed. “You didn’t deny him, did you. He offered you power, he threatened your darling clones–” he lifted his head and gazed directly at the security monitor with a flat baleful expression, the corners of his mouth lifting in a humorless smirk–a clear taunt, “and you rolled right over for him, didn’t you. Everything you wanted, all the power you wanted, you got to stop feeling helpless, and the clones were the excuse. Made you feel better about betraying us, because at least it was in line with your precious ethics. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that your clones like you a lot , too.”
“That’s certainly a complex parallel reality you’ve got there, Krell,” she said, keeping her voice carefully bland. Unfortunately, it was terribly plausible. The last thing she needed was Tarkin believing it. “It’s not what happened, but I can see why you’d come to those conclusions. Thing is,” she caught his gaze and stared him down; she could feel something in the back of her mind like pressure, and she pushed steadily against it, stern, “it’s based on what you would do in my position. But you are not me, and you do not know who or what I am. I’ve faced down things that make your Sith lords look like children’s stories, and I’ve done it with even less connection with the Force than I have now.”
Maybe it was her tone; maybe it was him picking up on the blank horror of the Borg she was deliberately pushing to the forefront of her mind. Maybe it was simply her expression, but he suddenly looked like he believed her. His smirk was wavering, the pressure against her mind abating. She kept pushing at it as she spoke, feeling it crumble away before her.
“Let me also remind you, it was assuming you knew who and what I was that landed you in here and shattered your plans. It was your decision to send those bounty hunters after me, to drag me out of my home and away from the people who needed me. It was your decision to take me to the Temple, and it was your decision to refuse to accept I was not who you had decided I was. And it was your decision to go after me when I stopped you from bullying one of your own men, and it was your decision to try to kill me.” She eyed him, letting the contempt come out clearly on her face. She wanted him to remember this, a time when his bullying had attracted attention he couldn’t afford, when it had brought him up against something more determined and a lot meaner than he was. A spasm of something like pain passed over his face as she pressed the point. “Your cowardice–and cowardice is what I call trying to crawl away from danger on the backs of your own men, Mr. Krell–has already done enough damage to your own life, to say nothing of the people you murdered in the process. And for my own sake…” She paused, considering whether it was worth it for her own sake to tell him. It certainly wasn’t for his, or wouldn’t be for a long, long time, even if that restorative justice Plo had spoken of actually worked in his case. After a moment, she decided it was. “You took me away from my crew. The people who needed me. If just one of them has so much as a scratch because of my absence…I’ll hold you responsible.”
He wanted to laugh at her. She held his gaze. His face worked a moment, trying to mock anyway, and failed. Another long moment, and she knew she had him; it felt now as if her mind were pressing down on something, and it had begun to waver. Whatever he might say from here, he didn’t doubt that she’d bested Dooku, not the other way around.
“You’re not always going to have Plo to save you,” he said, his breathing labored as if they’d been physically fighting, not trading barbs. “One day, you’re not going to have your clones, either. And I’ll be waiting. You shouldn’t have made an enemy of me, Chester.” It was bluster, pure and simple; the fear was still in his eyes. He hadn’t broken her eye contact, but now it was less challenge than simple inability, like he didn’t have the will for it. She kept her own gaze steady and implacable, watching the impotent rage mount in his own, and with it the fear. “I will kill you. One day, you’ll be alone, with no one to hide behind, and I will kill you.”
“You are certainly welcome to try,” she said softly, a world of threat in her voice, and she felt, rather than saw, him quail.
She looked at him a little longer, cold assessment, then turned the corner of her mouth up in faint mockery and turned her back on him. She half-expected him to start screaming at her, but it seemed he didn’t have enough wind in his sails for even that.
She found Dulcet and Lingo and Garter in a deeply unhappy little knot in the corridor and a moment’s glance was enough to tell her that while Krell’s implications about her relationship with her men had been largely incidental to her, it had been rather less so to them.
Dulcet, for example, looked about to do murder.
“Whatever he said, Commander, he still lost,” said Lingo, bracingly. “He’s finished, no matter what kind of filth he’s spouting.”
Dulcet gave him a glare, then looked at Chester. “He likes to say things like that. Good you didn’t let him get a rise out of you.”
“Gentlemen, I have been called far, far worse,” she said. “Insults about sexuality are usually the first option for most species. Some species even have specific slurs for Starfleet officers. Krell’s astounding lack of imagination is hardly the worst thing about him.”
Plo and Tarkin were coming down the corridor toward them, Plo with a slight stiffness to his posture that suggested he wasn’t thrilled about Tarkin’s company either.
“Generally speaking, we expect better of our Knights than that,” he said, firmly. Chester revised her opinion–perhaps it wasn’t just Tarkin’s presence.
“It’s Krell. He’s not been meeting the standards of your Knights for a while now.” She shrugged. “And I got the feeling that he resorted to insults because he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do much else about me, going forward.”
“Indeed,” said Tarkin, straight-faced, but she could feel the satisfaction oozing out of his pores. She didn’t trust that.
“Did you get the information you were looking for, Admiral?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Understanding his motives was vital.” But the look he gave her implied that understanding her motives was just as desirable.
“Commander, perhaps we should speak further,” said Plo, and by his tone she could tell there was something on his mind, something troubling him beyond Krell’s choice of insults. She nodded, and let him guide her down the hall to a small briefing room.
Dulcet, Lingo, and Garter followed, with expressions that indicated that no matter what Plo said, they weren’t going to leave them to it.
“Commander,” he said, as if he were being very delicate about a difficult subject, which made Chester brace for another scolding. And a bad one too. He’d certainly not been shy about reproving her in the past. “You are aware that Force sensitivity manifests in different ways, and there is no standard way in which it manifests.”
“Was I doing something in there?” she asked.
“It was in self-defense,” said Plo, reassuringly, which made it worse. Whatever she’d been doing, it hadn’t been good. “Krell was attempting to dominate your mind, and you responded━powerfully.”
Shit. “Are you trying to tell me I injured a prisoner without realizing it?”
“Only on a technicality.” Plo shook his head, and sighed, a little resigned. “Krell overestimated his own capacity for psychic connection, and underestimated yours. Think of it as the mental equivalent of trying to punch a punching bag, and hitting a solid brick wall instead.”
Chester quirked an eyebrow, relieved. “Ouch.”
“Indeed. Those on Force-suppressing drugs are not known for their good judgment.”
“I would imagine not,” she said, and shook her head. “To think that was an alternative to sticking me in that damned collar… ”
“That would be the usual protocol for a Force-sensitive prisoner, yes.” Plo tugged a chair out from the table, offering it to Chester, then considered her clone escorts and made the same offer to them. Lingo and Joyride accepted, with a sidelong look at the others, but Garter and Dulcet stayed standing.
“Different Force users have different strengths, as individual to them as their personalities,” said Plo. “I believe, Commander, I am beginning to get a sense of what yours is.”
Chester settled in her chair. “That sounds ominous.”
He didn’t immediately deny that. She was getting better at reading his expressions behind his mask, and this was a pensive, and worried, frown. He didn’t deny it. “You seem to have an affinity for the mind, Commander. Your shields are one example. Your defense of yourself when Krell attacked you just now another. You very nearly breached his defenses in turn.”
Chester blanched, feeling sick. “That would have been unforgivable,” she said, faint to her own ears. Plo shifted just a little, the tilt of his head quizzical. “Going uninvited into someone else’s mind,” she said. “In Vulcan culture━in our culture in general━that’s an appalling violation.”
“He was trying to do the same to you at the time, and you defended yourself, untrained as you are,” said Plo, his voice deliberately mild.
“Don’t make excuses for me,” she said bitterly. She remembered that feeling of pushing down on her sense of him, the cold deliberation in her own mind as she did so, and wanted to vomit. She hadn’t realized it might be so easy.
“It is not as profound a taboo for us as it evidently is for you,” said Plo, gently, “certainly not in self-defense.”
“It wasn’t in self-defense,” she snapped. “I felt him try, I could have let him go on trying all day without any risk to myself, but I just had to retaliate, because I wanted to be real clear to him that continuing to mess with me was a bad idea . I just didn’t realize how powerfully I’d managed to do that, and that doesn’t make it any better at all.”
“Then we have another cultural difference here, because that does in fact sound like self-defense to me” said Plo. “Self-defense and inexperience are very much mitigating circumstances in Jedi practice. Reaching out empathically, the way Krell attempted and you responded, is entirely normal among us━albeit usually as a form of greeting, or to offer support and companionship. We raise and lower our mental barriers according to circumstance, and among the inexperienced, accidental breaches are common. Had you broken through his defenses, Commander, what would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never been in a position to contemplate doing something like that.” Hurt him? Maybe. Enough to make him remember the pain when he thought about pulling that shit on someone else. Or push at him, pin him, like an older dog reproving a puppy that had gotten too boisterous. No, that would have been too kind. “I do not think I would have tried to kill him.” Not much comfort there.
“There is a certain feeling, when you break through another person’s shielding. It is hard to describe━like a sudden splash of cold water, perhaps━but hard to mistake.” Plo leaned forward over the table, the cheap conference-room chair creaking under him. “I do not know how your Vulcan teachers would have responded to such a thing, but among the Jedi, and indeed most Force traditions in this galaxy, a mental assault is not so different from a physical assault. Commander, listen to me. The fact that you responded so powerfully is the least important part of this equation. Krell tried to assault you━whether he succeeded or not is immaterial━and you were perfectly entitled to defend yourself. You ended the interaction on your own terms, and most importantly, you did not break his shields despite having very little conscious awareness of what you were trying to do. That speaks to both an unconscious awareness of your abilities━which is common among those with innate telepathic leanings━and an ingrained self-control which is exactly the sort of thing you will need if you ever actively make use of this talent.”
She gave him a flatly horrified look. All she could think of were the wartime uses. Interrogation, espionage, manipulation.
“Being able to communicate across long distances without the need for any sort of equipment comes in handy sometimes.” Plo gave her a concerned look. “A visit with a knock on the door is not equivalent to an invasion through a broken window.”
“Making sure Joyride hasn’t forgotten the requisitions list when he left his comm in the barracks,” said Lingo, glancing between Chester and Plo. “Yeah, that would definitely be useful, sir.”
“I would never ,” muttered Joyride.
Plo nodded toward them both, something grateful about the acknowledgement. “Outside of simple communication, a more borderline potential use is what is called ‘mind-tricking’━this is a spectrum of mental influences which ranges from benign to actively malign.”
“What.”
“Think of it as a potent form of encouragement, or sometimes validation.” He dipped his head, acknowledging the elephant in the room. “Or, indeed, undue pressure. On one end of the spectrum, you have my friends and I as children mind-tricking each other out of our nerves before important exams━one cannot mind-trick oneself, alas━a helpful action, done by mutual agreement. On the other end, you have what might be described as telepathic bullying, where a powerful mind openly harasses a weaker mind into capitulation. It goes without saying that the latter is something we strenuously avoid.”
“I should hope so.” There was a lot of territory in between, still a violation of autonomy. She thought of Dooku, the oppressive sense of fear, and her own whipsawing rage and fear. He had very likely been attempting something similar, and the anger on her own behalf was a brief, hot relief from the growing dread of her abilities. She hadn’t realized how she might do something like that accidentally, and it terrified her. Where was the line between telepathically shouting at someone, or defending herself, and breaching their mind?
Sympathy radiated from Plo. “I mention this specifically, because along with your telepathic abilities it seems you also have a remarkable talent for deception. You’re persuasive. Mind-tricking is an ability most Force-sensitives possess━though for most of us, it takes a significant amount of conscious effort.”
“Lying to someone and violating their autonomy are two very different things,” she said, shaken to her own ears. Her mind raced with the implications, and she glanced at Lingo. “What are you saying?”
What if she’d been doing this to everyone, unconsciously, all along?
T’Volis and Sotek would have picked up on it, she told herself. They would have told her. Helped her stop it. They wouldn’t have let her go around hurting people, so this had to be pretty new. Since she’d reached to the Force to stop Krell, most likely, though she thought uneasily of Dooku and the Council’s surprise that she had managed to fool him.
“Sir,” said Lingo with a worried glance at her, “with respect, maybe you should get to the point?” There was a warning edge in his voice.
“Count Dooku was a master of this particular skill.” Plo gave Chester a long, observing look. “So was Master Qui-Gon, in fact. The thing about mind-tricking is that you do not have to be Force-sensitive at all to do something like it. The Force only gives us a slightly more direct medium of communication. I am saying this, Commander, because it is easier to avoid making missteps when one is aware of what those missteps might look like.”
He steepled his fingers, resting his hands down on the tabletop. “It is a given that Dooku would have tried to mind-trick you while you were at his mercy. Your shields would have been perfectly capable of repelling the pressure; it would have felt a lot like physical exertion, in the absence of any obvious cause.”
“You said you were feeling better than you had in days on the shuttle,” said Lingo.
“Wait,” said Joyride. “Wait, are you saying that the Commander kicked Dooku’s shebs while he was trying to mind-control her and he still didn’t see it coming? ”
There was a slight pause. Plo gave a very slight nod. “It does seem that way, yes.”
“Force,” said Joyride, fervently, “ I want to join Starfleet.”
“Perhaps that will be an option someday,” Plo said. “Commander, given your very self-contained instincts and your strong ethical convictions regarding mental contact in general, I can’t imagine you are at a high risk of misusing mind-tricks. With that said, the ability spans an entire spectrum, and what we have frequently found is that even with a benevolent influence, the strength of your resolve alone can modify the outcome. The more you believe in what you are doing, the stronger your influence will be. My suggestion, in this case, is that you simply refrain from using the Force in such a way.” His brows squinched above his goggles, in what Chester imagined might be a concerned smile. “Which I suspect may be your preference in any case.”
“No shit,” said Chester, passionately. “I’d very much prefer to make sure I can’t do it by accident, either. When I get home, I think I’d better look up some of my Vulcan friends and see what advice they’ve got now that I actually seem to have some telepathic ability.” She frowned, remembering. “It’s weird, really. T’Volis always remarked on my lack of psi sensitivity, as did the standard exam I got when I entered the Academy.”
“It is possible that these abilities have simply been very dormant all your life. If you were always a private, independent sort of person, perhaps it simply was never an instinctive thing to reach out through the Force━and like a muscle, Force-sensitivity will wither if you do not use it. If these psi tests were not looking for broad Force-sensitivity, they may not have picked up on a potential that was as yet unfulfilled.”
“I see,” she said. Her contact with T’Volis had been rather more than that, but she was not going to be able to say that without blushing, and she did not want to explain the intimacy of a mind meld of her personal experience with her ex in front of the men. She wondered what the hell Plo made of the brief wash of embarrassment, then set it aside. “Thank you for the warning.”
She hesitated, looking at him. Her gut still roiled with unease. “I take it,” she said, “that I’ll need some training on how or how not to use my particular talents?”
“Undoubtedly yes,” said Plo, “but I think it best to shelve the issue until we return to Coruscant. Mental contact is not my area of expertise.”
She took a deep breath in, relieved. She was not ready to start the equivalent training for her mental abilities, not by a long shot. Besides, it was a little reassuring that he wasn’t actually an expert on everything.
“Don’t worry, Commander,” said Joyride, earnest, “we’ll tell you if we feel anything crawling round in our brains.”