The Repeating Day - 10.138

[Ndonsa]

ITERATION THIRTY-EIGHT


The Alliance pilot beside her in the cockpit leaned forward, eyes wide.

"You've never done this before?"

"This is my first day," Ndonsa said, pulling on the 'yoke' and jerking the ship into the sky.

"Not so fast!" He tried to grab the controls from her, but she elbowed him back.

Master Anbira said to take a journey.

She had taken one into her mind in the library. She had focused on the physical with Halajiin. Now she would take a journey to the stars.

Ndonsa arrowed the ship up through the atmosphere, the comm and her teacher screaming at her about clearance. The light freighter broke through and the invisible force pressing her into her seat lessened. She had been in space before, with Evil Dirk and his metal people. Droids. Her pink eyes scanned the buttons and switches in front of her until she found the one that would put them into hyperspace.

It was a big handle. She put a paw on it.

All the color drained out of the pilot's face. "No, wait, wait! You have to input -"

Ndonsa pulled the handle.


giphy.gif






















ITERATION THIRTY-NINE


"And what does this do?" Ndonsa pointed at the console.

"That's the hyperspace control. We won't be using that," laughed T'im. "Now, you have to do a preflight check every time, make sure you have fuel, that there are no -"

"How do you make it work?" she persisted. "The hyper-space."

T'im didn't seem to mind being interrupted. He pointed at a black box nestled in the side of the console. "You use the navicomputer to get jump coordinates. You can't jump safely without a destination."

Ndonsa nodded. "How does the computer know where to go?"

"Many, many years ago, pilots mapped the galaxy. The whole thing - well," T'im amended quickly, "We still haven't mapped the Unknown Regions. Or Wild Space, really. But the important bits, those are all mapped. The navicomputer draws on all that knowledge and uses, uh, math, to find the quickest or safest route through the stars to where you want to go. If you jump blindly you could send the ship right through a planet."

He laughed, "So make sure you never do that."

She did not laugh. "That must have been what happened."

"What was that?" He looked up.

Ndonsa pointed at the fuel gauge. "What is that?"

"Ah, the fuel gauge. Well, that shows you -"

She let him talk on and on, showing her all the things she had already learned. Waking up in her bed with the sun on her fur after pulling the hyperspace handle had been confusing and disorienting. Now, at least, she had an idea of what had gone wrong.

[Ndonsa]

ITERATION FORTY-ONE


"This is kidnapping!"

"You are not being harmed." Ndonsa stepped over T'im, and he strained against the power cords she had tied him with. Rolling over, he tried wiggling down the passage behind her.

She ignored him, walking into the cockpit. It hadn't taken long to figure out the longest possible hyperspace jump from Ossus, and tricking T'im into inputting it for her had not been difficult.

A bag full of food sat in the passage beside T'im, and her spear was tucked into a safe place in the cockpit. She perched on the pilot's chair, balancing on the balls of her feet as she crouched and stared out at the blue swirls beyond the viewscreen.

Hours passed.

Ndonsa let T'im get up to eat and use the refresher, then locked him into a room. Occasionally she could hear him screaming words at her, but she did not listen as she explored every inch of the light freighter she had stolen.

When she grew tired Ndonsa curled up in the pilot's seat and hummed a song.

Her eyes drifted closed.

[Ndonsa]

"Ndonsa, can you hear us?"

"Ndonsa..."



Garfiffe? Was this the god of the yellow-furs, calling to her? She struggled for consciousness.

As she opened her eyes, the sun was warm on her fur. Disappointment shot through her like a spear, but hands pressed her back down when she tried to sit up.

"Take it easy," said a female voice. "Try not to move."

Ndonsa looked around, her pink eyes focusing on the faces above her. Master Laran's red headfur was escaping the braid she always put it in, and her hands were on Ndonsa's shoulders. Master Anbira hovered just beyond her, a concerned look on his face.

The ground underneath her was hard. She was outside, not in her room or in her bed.

As she focused beyond the other Jedi, she could see a ceiling above her. To the side, through a hole in the stone wall, the late afternoon sun was shining in and resting on her.

Not outside. The library.

Ndonsa tried again to sit up, but her body did not cooperate.

[Serena Laran]

"Take it easy," soothed Serena, gently pressing the Kufu back to the ground. "You've been unconscious for a while."

She looked at Anbira, relief on both their faces. A padawan had found her on the ground in the Library several hours ago and run to get help when she wouldn't wake up. Serena had not been able to rouse Ndonsa - indeed, it appeared that her body was in perfect health. Strangely, her brain activity had been off the charts.

Past Anbira was a free standing stone doorway, Ndonsa's body positioned in such a way that it appeared she may have fallen through it. Two Jedi Knights were examining it carefully. There was power thrumming through it - not electronic power, but the Force.

She turned back to Ndonsa. "How do you feel?"

[Ndonsa]

"Like oatmush," she groaned. "How... how long has it been?"

Master Laran resisted her as she tried to sit up again, but then relented and helped her up. "It has been a few hours. Most of the day."

"Hours?" Ndonsa ran her paw over her face. "One day?"

The two Jedi looked at each other, and nodded. "We were very worried."

Ndonsa staggered to her footpaws and ran for the door, stumbling out into the jungle.

[Anbira Hicchoru]

"Ndonsa, wait!"

Concern etched on his face, Anbira followed after his student. The sudden collapse was concerning enough, but the return has brought with it fresher worries, if perhaps less grave than before. They were still no closer to understanding what had happened.

"Ndonsa!"

[Ndonsa]

"Master Hicchoru, I ... did the crane fall this day?" Ndonsa looked up at the sky, and then sat heavily in the dirt at the base of a tree. "No, that does not happen yet."

She put her head in her paws, an ache between her ears blooming suddenly. "Was I late to..." Her voice trailed off. It was starting to come back to her.

"I was exploring the Library. To help ... cat log it?" Her nose wrinkled as she concentrated on remembering. "I was ashamed to tell you I could not read. Or write. But I found a door to no place, and when I touched it with the Force it..."

Ndonsa scratched her claws against her scalp and into her headfur, her brain full of other memories that could not have happened. But they did.

[Anbira Hicchoru]

Patiently, Anbira took a seat on the ground opposite his pupil. He sensed a great deal of confusion and emotion from Ndonsa, and there was something else at the root of it. A feeling of...not awareness, but of something teetering on it's edge.

"What is the first thing you remember happening next?"

[Ndonsa]

“Waking up in my bed.” Ndonsa gripped her head with her paws, then put one on her many beaded necklaces. “And again, and again. I lived the same day, Master. Over and over. Like ...like the Whomprat Day holofilm. We visited the library. I told you I could not read and you taught me how even though every day I had to tell you again that it had happened before.”

She sat back against the tree, staring up into its branches. Did any of it happen? Would she still know how to read?

“I do not know if it was a dream but it felt​ real.”

[Anbira Hicchoru]

"One of the hardest lessons I had to learn in my days on Felucia was to accept that there is some amount of reality in what we perceive as the fantastic and even impossible. Ndonsa, you are my student. I can't provide every answer, but I can help you to learn where to look. I can feel this great crush of things on your mind. Don't become overwhelmed."

The Jedi hermit placed a hand at the Nehantite's shoulder.

"Let's start with something in particular. You said that we read, or that I taught you how. What did we read?"

[Ndonsa]

She looked up with hope, pink eyes meeting brown.

“Yes. Yes!” Ndonsa grabbed his hand in her paw and pulled him to his feet. “The book. Yes. You always believed me when I mentioned we were reading the Journal of the Whills. If it is there, then...”

She was tugging him down the path, but quickly released him and broke into a run back to the Library. She knew exactly where to go, dashing past a startled Master Laran.

If it was the same, if the dream was true, then the book would be just here in the stacks, waiting to be catalogued.

Ndonsa put out her paw, her momentum stilled in an instant, and almost reverently stroked the thick leather spine of the dusty book.

[Anbira Hicchoru]

"The Journal of the..."

It was Anbira's turn to be overwhelmed. How in blazes? But there was no mistaking the directness of her surety. Ndonsa was electrified by it, and wasted little time bounding back toward the library, leaving her master to play catch-up.

"Ndonsa!" He ran back the way they'd came, struggling to keep up with her sudden enthusiasm.

[Ndonsa]

It was there, just as it was every day.

Ndonsa hesitated to pull it from the stack, until she heard her master come up behind her. Carefully she removed it, blowing the dust off, and turned to put it into Master Hicchoru’s hands.

”Just as I remember,” she said softly, her tail waving gently. “We can share it again, Master.”

[Anbira Hicchoru]

There was no dawdling in Ndonsa's actions. She walked directly to one stack of books in many, selected one, and returned as if she had done so a hundred times before. But there was no mistaking the thick patina of undisturbed dust. Ndonsa blew it away in a sharp exhalation, revealing the careful detailing on the cover.

"Ndonsa..."

He reached out, but hesitated just before touching the book. Anbira looked in his pupil's eyes. They had none of the surprise held in his own. This was deeply familiar to her.

"...how?"

[Ndonsa]

“I have been here many times,” she said simply. “You say I was ‘out’ for many hours - to me it was the same day many, many times. Over forty days of one day.”

Ndonsa watched him hold the book like a newly born cub, and smiled. “I died in the dream. I tried many times to escape it. In the end, it was leaving Ossus that woke me up.”

[Anbira Hicchoru]

Once you remove the impossible, the implausible - however unlikely - must be the truth. Anbira could feel it in the surety of Ndonsa's words that this was exactly what had happened.

"This is the will of the Force at work. There is no other conclusion to be reached. Ndonsa, this knowledge is sacred. I only know of it by oral tradition, passed down from the spirits. You were meant to know this for a reason."

[Ndonsa]

Ndonsa nodded, taking in her master’s words with her whole heart. She put her paw on his hand.

”Thank you, Master Hicchoru. For everything.”

For a moment they stood there, together, his foreseen future an unspoken thing between them. Then she guided him to sit, opened the ancient book, and began to read it to him.




The End