My Own Game - 5
Aug. 10th, 2024 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aliyn_ravenA long time in a galaxy far, far away, everything was completely different from what was written in the history textbooks at the demand of the rulers and their rivals.
The teenager received abilities one didn't want. A happy life is destroyed, and survival and freedom can become empty words. But if the world wants to turn you into a toy, you can make it play your own game with you.
***
Self-consolation scribbles. I found a great Star Wars game but couldn't even get past the prologue because the controls were so complicated. This fanfic is NOT like that game. And it is AU for SW. I specifically try not to show who the character is, a boy or a girl, what their appearance is, so that readers can choose all this themselves, like in a video game.
— 5 —
"Do quchu-yinying!" Tina demanded. "Quickly, if you want to live!"
"Do what?" I didn't understand.
She made some signs in the air. I repeated them, but nothing happened.
"Put the Force in it, you idiot!" Tina growled. "Faster or you're finished!"
I still didn't understand anything, but I did as she said. She didn't mean me any harm, unless the Force was lying. And I was too confused and scared to decide for myself.
I felt a pleasantly cool wave of Force, and that was it. Tina smiled faintly.
"All the data from all the tracking devices in the library for the last minute has been erased. The cameras and microphones will be working again shortly."
A new wave of Force, or rather a shadow of the wave, told me that surveillance had been activated. A moment later, security ran into the library.
"It was boys," Tina said. "They threw a firecracker and ran off. I didn't see their faces. And I'm not hurt. And you?" She looked at me.
"I'm fine. And I didn't have time to see them either too."
I didn't feel the Force in Tina, but she hid the consequences of its use very confidently and skilfully.
The guards left. And Tina said:
"Never try to talk to me. Never at all. I don't communicate with Force-wankers."
She, barely holding back a painful groan, rose on her crutches and hobbled towards the exit. I still didn't understand anything, but I wasn't surprised. This is my usual fate: as soon as something good starts, some absurd accident ruins it.
I'm back on my project. There's still some time left before the end of this lesson, and I need to finish collecting the material.
And then... I'll write everything as it is. If I get kicked out of the Academy, I'll sit in a municipal school until the end of the school year. They're required to accept students at any time. And I'll start fourth grade at some good online school. Anyway, real life rejects me wherever I go. Things are going much better for me on the net.
And I wrote everything I thought. And about the fact that the Resistance fought with meat, that is, didn't consider the losses in manpower, too. The Empire, in my opinion, took care of people, despite the fact that its stormtroopers were only good for killing unarmed peasants. In short, a plague on both your houses, as Major Tucker said about the Order and the Guard, about the Galactic Republic and the Empire. (I know about Shakespeare; I'm not a savage or an ignoramus.)
Tucker was well versed in the subject. He had been raised as a Sith since birth, and at sixteen he had run away to the Jedi. Tucker had been there for three years, and when he had finally become convinced that the Light Ones were no different from the Dark Ones, he had fled to the nearest Foreign Legion on a well-developed planet.
Tucker had served Kadvir for two years when the Tivan Border War began. Tucker had shown great valour, and the government had given him ahead of schedule citizenship, awarded him the Order of the Purple Rose, and sent him to the Army College. Tucker said he had always known that Major was the highest rank he was fit for. But Tucker had earned it quickly. He said that Kadvir's army was fair.
Tucker had planned to happily remain a major until age retirement, but a serious wound forced him into disability retirement. His military base gave him recommendations for several schools and security companies to keep him from becoming depressed and feeling useless and alone. He chose the Irene Weiss School because it was near the house Tucker had bought shortly before his wound.
...Strangely enough, my project was a success. There was an interesting discussion with my classmates; I even formed my own faction in the game of the Great Council of Worlds, which was organised by the teacher. She made some purely technical corrections to my project without affecting its meaning and sent it to the competition.
I didn't mind. I needed the scores for the university.
It was much worse with the Force. It didn't manifest itself in any way; none of the Jedi or Sith training Major Tucker recommended helped to find it. But I understood that hoping for liberation from the Force was stupid. It will crawl out when it is least needed.
The project took an unexpected turn. Sliff Tfail, a Serpenian guy from our strategy study group, brought me a high school girl, the captain of the football team, to help her develop a programme to kick ass for the Genuill Kid College team.
I was a little surprised by Sliffe's choice; football is not the most convenient sport for Serpenians; they, with their four arms and ability to stand on the end of a long tail, they are basketball stars, but if the football team sees his usefulness as a player, then to hell with stereotypes.
I knew nothing about football and had not yet caught the school rivalry bug, but the task itself intrigued me. I began to study the rules and the results of the games. I also got Sliffe involved; he is a footballer and should be able to be an analyst.
He resisted a little, saying that he could only kick the ball around but not plan, but he obeyed the captain, who found my idea useful.
"Sliff can talk anyone into anything, that's why I'm here," the captain said. "He must be my successor. I'm in my penultimate year at this school, and I'll have time to prepare him. Sliff can manage people; he will be able to keep the team united and motivated."
I modelled match variants; the captain liked my ideas; she even invited me to train and watch famous professional matches. And with Sliff, we started talking about movies and books and doing homework together. (Boarding school and homework, yes). We even started building a common farm in a sandbox video game.
Of course, a story this good couldn't help but end in complete failure. The Force. That scoundrel showed up exactly when Sliff and I had escaped the noise of the classrooms for independent work and were doing our homework in the garden. I was writing essays for both of us in Ur-Kittât, the ceremonial dialect of the Sithish, and Sliff was solving his and my math tasks.
As Kadvir is a neutral state, ordinary citizens do business with both the Republic and the Empire. Sithish, with all its three dialects, and Republic Basic Standard are the most useful for finding good jobs. They are the most commonly taught in schools. And yes: Republican Basic Standard is the language of the Big Republic, Republicish, but not the pan-galactic language, no matter what the Republic imagines of itself as the centre of the universe.
There are many places in the galaxy that are highly developed economically, legally, and scientifically where people have no idea of the Republicish and value Bocce and Sithish more (it is not only spoken in the Empire and its satellites).
Kadvirish is also quite popular.
But enough about linguistics. There are more important problems. I, cursing the ban on the use of gadgets and Galaxnet during homework time and the power of the jammers that would not allow me to turn on the phone, dug into the damn paper dictionary and grammar reference, trying to figure out where I had screwed up, trying to express Sliffe's idea about the future of sport on Ur-Kittât. The phrase sounded awkward, and this language is quite musical; everything should sound smooth; the runes should also form a harmonious ribbon, similar to lace.
I began to hum the phrase, hoping to find the error that way. But my ears are hanging on a tree in music; even Sliff, who was not at all brilliant in Sithish, fell off the bench onto the grass laughing.
"The tail of the Great Iffu! Eirian, did you hear what you said?!"
I looked at him sombrely. Sithish is a tonal language, and the same word, pronounced in different tones, has different meanings: "tuoshvi" in a rising tone means "game"; if the tone is falling, it is "river"; falling-rising means "breakfast"; rising-falling... There are eight tones in total in all, and a harmless phrase can easily turn into an obscene curse.
At my previous school, my Mum consoled me by saying that the CEO only reads the most important correspondence and writes replies, and my Dad said that when I start getting serious about business, I will hire the most beautiful Sith of any race as a translator. But at this school, much more attention was paid to rhetoric, and I immediately slid from "good" to "satisfactory" and even to "insufficient". I was lucky that I didn't get "failure".
I sighed, added a transcription and tones in Common Sith to the phrase, and tried to read it, conducting myself with my hand. It turned out, judging by Sliffe's amusement, even worse than before: a person devoid of musicality sincerely believes that he sings correctly, but those around him say that he has not hit a single note. I did not sing, but the principle is similar.
"Unbelievable! You're not even conducting in time!" laughed Sliff.
Okay, to hell with Sliff's hilarity, but I found the error. I rewrote the phrase, added the transcription, and started reading, again helping myself with hand movements.
Out of nowhere came a river of packets of ready-to-eat breakfast foods; the tip is "Just Add Water". Each one, in addition to the company name and logo, had the words "Receive a ticket to the game of the season!". Sliff shouted in horror and ran away.
And I was stunned with amazement, seeing the Force for the first time. Streams of black, white, and grey plasma intertwined, flowed into each other, and broke up into bright big sparks of all those colours that monochrome actually consists of. And again gathered into three streams of plasma.
The Force disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. And I woke up from my stupor. A pile of drifter food, a frightened friend who doesn't want to know me, and an upcoming grand scandal in the media: "The heir of Gwalchtan-TNC is a Forsian without self-control, dangerous to society." So what next? A boarding shelter for freaks, life with parents on a wild planet, or being forced to choose between the Order and the Guard?
The media will latch onto parents simply because they are a fat target. The proletarians and office plankton love it when the media gnaws at the rich and do not think that a scandal that caused a fall in shares will leave them without work: business partners will rush to escape from the noise so as not to get caught in the crossfire themselves, banks will not give loans, and similar events. The lumpen will add fire, since yelling at protests for free booze is their favourite pastime.
I headed for the school building. I was hoping the "Put on a cheeky face and accuse everyone of slander" option would work. I don't know anything; I'm a victim; I was lying unconscious, and that's all!
To my surprise, all the students had gathered in the hall on the second floor, where the self-study classes were, and were shouting at the top of their lungs and discussing the appearance of Forcian at the Academy.
Sliff ran up to me.
"Hooray, you're alive! I saw you washed away by the Force. I called for help. They didn't believe me!"
"I wasn't washed away. I fell behind the bench and passed out."
Sliff pulled me to the nurse, telling me that he saw a very tall, even by adult standards, human or reptiloid in a uniform jacket and kepi, who staged a provocation with the Force.
"But why does Forcean need so much drifter food?" Sliff wondered. "If he wants to go to the match, he can charm the stadium security and sit in the VIP box. No need to win a prize for an economy class seat. A kepi and a jacket in the summer—he's just arrived from the Frontier Belt. When my family moved here, we were cold even in the summer the first year."
I followed him listlessly, trying to figure out what was going on. "Tall"—Sliff was lying on the grass when I was standing, so his shocked brain could remember me like that. Jacket and kepi—I shiver the whole time. Everyone except the new settlers from the Belt, Tina, stoned on sedatives, and me, the eternally sick one, wears short-sleeved uniform shirts.
But otherwise... Why doesn't Sliff remember that I was the author of the witchcraft? Someone has done some serious work on his memories. But who? It certainly wasn't me, and it certainly wasn't the Force itself. There's another Forcean here. And for some reason, they have rescued me.
But what do they want in return?
https://archiveofourown.org/works/57638197
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14376014/1/My-Own-Game
The teenager received abilities one didn't want. A happy life is destroyed, and survival and freedom can become empty words. But if the world wants to turn you into a toy, you can make it play your own game with you.
***
Self-consolation scribbles. I found a great Star Wars game but couldn't even get past the prologue because the controls were so complicated. This fanfic is NOT like that game. And it is AU for SW. I specifically try not to show who the character is, a boy or a girl, what their appearance is, so that readers can choose all this themselves, like in a video game.
— 5 —
"Do quchu-yinying!" Tina demanded. "Quickly, if you want to live!"
"Do what?" I didn't understand.
She made some signs in the air. I repeated them, but nothing happened.
"Put the Force in it, you idiot!" Tina growled. "Faster or you're finished!"
I still didn't understand anything, but I did as she said. She didn't mean me any harm, unless the Force was lying. And I was too confused and scared to decide for myself.
I felt a pleasantly cool wave of Force, and that was it. Tina smiled faintly.
"All the data from all the tracking devices in the library for the last minute has been erased. The cameras and microphones will be working again shortly."
A new wave of Force, or rather a shadow of the wave, told me that surveillance had been activated. A moment later, security ran into the library.
"It was boys," Tina said. "They threw a firecracker and ran off. I didn't see their faces. And I'm not hurt. And you?" She looked at me.
"I'm fine. And I didn't have time to see them either too."
I didn't feel the Force in Tina, but she hid the consequences of its use very confidently and skilfully.
The guards left. And Tina said:
"Never try to talk to me. Never at all. I don't communicate with Force-wankers."
She, barely holding back a painful groan, rose on her crutches and hobbled towards the exit. I still didn't understand anything, but I wasn't surprised. This is my usual fate: as soon as something good starts, some absurd accident ruins it.
I'm back on my project. There's still some time left before the end of this lesson, and I need to finish collecting the material.
And then... I'll write everything as it is. If I get kicked out of the Academy, I'll sit in a municipal school until the end of the school year. They're required to accept students at any time. And I'll start fourth grade at some good online school. Anyway, real life rejects me wherever I go. Things are going much better for me on the net.
And I wrote everything I thought. And about the fact that the Resistance fought with meat, that is, didn't consider the losses in manpower, too. The Empire, in my opinion, took care of people, despite the fact that its stormtroopers were only good for killing unarmed peasants. In short, a plague on both your houses, as Major Tucker said about the Order and the Guard, about the Galactic Republic and the Empire. (I know about Shakespeare; I'm not a savage or an ignoramus.)
Tucker was well versed in the subject. He had been raised as a Sith since birth, and at sixteen he had run away to the Jedi. Tucker had been there for three years, and when he had finally become convinced that the Light Ones were no different from the Dark Ones, he had fled to the nearest Foreign Legion on a well-developed planet.
Tucker had served Kadvir for two years when the Tivan Border War began. Tucker had shown great valour, and the government had given him ahead of schedule citizenship, awarded him the Order of the Purple Rose, and sent him to the Army College. Tucker said he had always known that Major was the highest rank he was fit for. But Tucker had earned it quickly. He said that Kadvir's army was fair.
Tucker had planned to happily remain a major until age retirement, but a serious wound forced him into disability retirement. His military base gave him recommendations for several schools and security companies to keep him from becoming depressed and feeling useless and alone. He chose the Irene Weiss School because it was near the house Tucker had bought shortly before his wound.
...Strangely enough, my project was a success. There was an interesting discussion with my classmates; I even formed my own faction in the game of the Great Council of Worlds, which was organised by the teacher. She made some purely technical corrections to my project without affecting its meaning and sent it to the competition.
I didn't mind. I needed the scores for the university.
It was much worse with the Force. It didn't manifest itself in any way; none of the Jedi or Sith training Major Tucker recommended helped to find it. But I understood that hoping for liberation from the Force was stupid. It will crawl out when it is least needed.
The project took an unexpected turn. Sliff Tfail, a Serpenian guy from our strategy study group, brought me a high school girl, the captain of the football team, to help her develop a programme to kick ass for the Genuill Kid College team.
I was a little surprised by Sliffe's choice; football is not the most convenient sport for Serpenians; they, with their four arms and ability to stand on the end of a long tail, they are basketball stars, but if the football team sees his usefulness as a player, then to hell with stereotypes.
I knew nothing about football and had not yet caught the school rivalry bug, but the task itself intrigued me. I began to study the rules and the results of the games. I also got Sliffe involved; he is a footballer and should be able to be an analyst.
He resisted a little, saying that he could only kick the ball around but not plan, but he obeyed the captain, who found my idea useful.
"Sliff can talk anyone into anything, that's why I'm here," the captain said. "He must be my successor. I'm in my penultimate year at this school, and I'll have time to prepare him. Sliff can manage people; he will be able to keep the team united and motivated."
I modelled match variants; the captain liked my ideas; she even invited me to train and watch famous professional matches. And with Sliff, we started talking about movies and books and doing homework together. (Boarding school and homework, yes). We even started building a common farm in a sandbox video game.
Of course, a story this good couldn't help but end in complete failure. The Force. That scoundrel showed up exactly when Sliff and I had escaped the noise of the classrooms for independent work and were doing our homework in the garden. I was writing essays for both of us in Ur-Kittât, the ceremonial dialect of the Sithish, and Sliff was solving his and my math tasks.
As Kadvir is a neutral state, ordinary citizens do business with both the Republic and the Empire. Sithish, with all its three dialects, and Republic Basic Standard are the most useful for finding good jobs. They are the most commonly taught in schools. And yes: Republican Basic Standard is the language of the Big Republic, Republicish, but not the pan-galactic language, no matter what the Republic imagines of itself as the centre of the universe.
There are many places in the galaxy that are highly developed economically, legally, and scientifically where people have no idea of the Republicish and value Bocce and Sithish more (it is not only spoken in the Empire and its satellites).
Kadvirish is also quite popular.
But enough about linguistics. There are more important problems. I, cursing the ban on the use of gadgets and Galaxnet during homework time and the power of the jammers that would not allow me to turn on the phone, dug into the damn paper dictionary and grammar reference, trying to figure out where I had screwed up, trying to express Sliffe's idea about the future of sport on Ur-Kittât. The phrase sounded awkward, and this language is quite musical; everything should sound smooth; the runes should also form a harmonious ribbon, similar to lace.
I began to hum the phrase, hoping to find the error that way. But my ears are hanging on a tree in music; even Sliff, who was not at all brilliant in Sithish, fell off the bench onto the grass laughing.
"The tail of the Great Iffu! Eirian, did you hear what you said?!"
I looked at him sombrely. Sithish is a tonal language, and the same word, pronounced in different tones, has different meanings: "tuoshvi" in a rising tone means "game"; if the tone is falling, it is "river"; falling-rising means "breakfast"; rising-falling... There are eight tones in total in all, and a harmless phrase can easily turn into an obscene curse.
At my previous school, my Mum consoled me by saying that the CEO only reads the most important correspondence and writes replies, and my Dad said that when I start getting serious about business, I will hire the most beautiful Sith of any race as a translator. But at this school, much more attention was paid to rhetoric, and I immediately slid from "good" to "satisfactory" and even to "insufficient". I was lucky that I didn't get "failure".
I sighed, added a transcription and tones in Common Sith to the phrase, and tried to read it, conducting myself with my hand. It turned out, judging by Sliffe's amusement, even worse than before: a person devoid of musicality sincerely believes that he sings correctly, but those around him say that he has not hit a single note. I did not sing, but the principle is similar.
"Unbelievable! You're not even conducting in time!" laughed Sliff.
Okay, to hell with Sliff's hilarity, but I found the error. I rewrote the phrase, added the transcription, and started reading, again helping myself with hand movements.
Out of nowhere came a river of packets of ready-to-eat breakfast foods; the tip is "Just Add Water". Each one, in addition to the company name and logo, had the words "Receive a ticket to the game of the season!". Sliff shouted in horror and ran away.
And I was stunned with amazement, seeing the Force for the first time. Streams of black, white, and grey plasma intertwined, flowed into each other, and broke up into bright big sparks of all those colours that monochrome actually consists of. And again gathered into three streams of plasma.
The Force disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. And I woke up from my stupor. A pile of drifter food, a frightened friend who doesn't want to know me, and an upcoming grand scandal in the media: "The heir of Gwalchtan-TNC is a Forsian without self-control, dangerous to society." So what next? A boarding shelter for freaks, life with parents on a wild planet, or being forced to choose between the Order and the Guard?
The media will latch onto parents simply because they are a fat target. The proletarians and office plankton love it when the media gnaws at the rich and do not think that a scandal that caused a fall in shares will leave them without work: business partners will rush to escape from the noise so as not to get caught in the crossfire themselves, banks will not give loans, and similar events. The lumpen will add fire, since yelling at protests for free booze is their favourite pastime.
I headed for the school building. I was hoping the "Put on a cheeky face and accuse everyone of slander" option would work. I don't know anything; I'm a victim; I was lying unconscious, and that's all!
To my surprise, all the students had gathered in the hall on the second floor, where the self-study classes were, and were shouting at the top of their lungs and discussing the appearance of Forcian at the Academy.
Sliff ran up to me.
"Hooray, you're alive! I saw you washed away by the Force. I called for help. They didn't believe me!"
"I wasn't washed away. I fell behind the bench and passed out."
Sliff pulled me to the nurse, telling me that he saw a very tall, even by adult standards, human or reptiloid in a uniform jacket and kepi, who staged a provocation with the Force.
"But why does Forcean need so much drifter food?" Sliff wondered. "If he wants to go to the match, he can charm the stadium security and sit in the VIP box. No need to win a prize for an economy class seat. A kepi and a jacket in the summer—he's just arrived from the Frontier Belt. When my family moved here, we were cold even in the summer the first year."
I followed him listlessly, trying to figure out what was going on. "Tall"—Sliff was lying on the grass when I was standing, so his shocked brain could remember me like that. Jacket and kepi—I shiver the whole time. Everyone except the new settlers from the Belt, Tina, stoned on sedatives, and me, the eternally sick one, wears short-sleeved uniform shirts.
But otherwise... Why doesn't Sliff remember that I was the author of the witchcraft? Someone has done some serious work on his memories. But who? It certainly wasn't me, and it certainly wasn't the Force itself. There's another Forcean here. And for some reason, they have rescued me.
But what do they want in return?
https://archiveofourown.org/works/57638197
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14376014/1/My-Own-Game
